Que font et que sont les partis politiques roumains?

Abstract

At the very moment of the fall of Romanian communism, pluripartism was viewed as an irrefutable sign of democracy. However, political pluralism was not a value to be simply inserted in a sphere of political representations forged during communism, nor parties political objects to be easily conceived and build in a political life deserted by the Communist Party. The article explores and synthesizes the ways those two fundamental references of a democracy -i.e. political pluralism and political parties- were conceptualized by the Romanian postcommunist politicians: what is a political party? what parties are supposed to do in the emerging political regime and what kind of societal pluralism are they supposed to mirror? Those are questions whose answers and the way they were answered lies in the heart of Romanian democratization and regime building in the 1990 and 2000.