‘My First Instinct Was To Burn Them’: Conspiracy Ideology Hits Western Shelves To Woo Romanian Diaspora

BUCHAREST — When she stopped in last month at a shop called Magazin Romanesc, in a village about 40 minutes east of Spain’s Valencia Coast, Malina says she was pleasantly surprised to find newspapers dedicated to the Romanian community.

She and a friend went in out of curiosity, she says, but got a lot more than they bargained for when they picked up a slim volume of a magazine called Tara Mea, or My Country.

“I was so shocked by the content that my first instinct was to take all the magazines and burn them or hide them so nobody could see the contents,” Malina, who does not want her last name published, tells RFE/RL’s Romanian Service.

It bills itself as a magazine for “those who love Romania.” But it hints at deep suspicion of the Romanian state.

Its five articles and two news stories on its 12 pages in the first issue all involve questions of child welfare with conspiratorial twists. There are new and recycled polemical tracts on pedophilia and the state’s alleged plans to turn children into “docile instruments” of secularism or to facilitate the “breakdown of the family.”

Malina, who lives in Northern Ireland, was outraged.

“This doesn’t represent me, my beliefs, my origins, or my community,” she recalls thinking.

But it’s unclear how much her compatriots agree with that assessment.

The free Romanian-language Tara Mea has caught the attention of Romanians at home and abroad since arriving in shops frequented by Eastern European expats in Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Those countries are home to more than half of the 5.7 million Romanians who officially reside abroad.

Those communities proved to be a springboard for the nationalist-populist right wing in Romania most conspicuously represented by the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), which exploded onto the scene with a 9 percent showing in elections three years ago peddling traditionalist views backed by extreme right-wing intellectuals and echoes of interwar fascism.

Although there is no evidence so far of a direct link, Cristian Pirvulescu, dean of the political science faculty at the National School of Political Science and Public Administration (SNSPA) in Bucharest, says Tara Mea looks like a bid to boost AUR’s influence and electoral prospects among Romanians abroad.

“AUR is counting on a massive vote of Romanians from the diaspora, and not only those who come from the evangelical, neo-Protestant environment but also those from the Orthodox world,” Parvulescu tells RFE/RL’s Romanian Service.

An article for the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), a political-science talking shop, warned last month that the “AUR is growing in popularity, and with parliamentary elections coming in 2024, the party constitutes a real threat to the mainstream.”

Romania is slated to hold four rounds of elections next year, kicking off with EU elections in June followed by local voting, then presidential and parliamentary ballots.

Writing for the ECPR, Ivo Kesler, an undergraduate student who follows extremism and authoritarianism in the region, wrote that “the far right has awoken again in Romania, and it is stronger than ever.” He added that “after the 2024 parliamentary elections, we face the alarming prospect of AUR becoming a governing party.”

He noted “extreme volatility” and the “commonplace” of short-lived governments in Romania, fueled in part by the kind of dissatisfaction and longing for a “once-‘Great’ Romania” that AUR encourages.

“The country’s electorate, especially younger diaspora Romanians, can relate to these problems in search of their own, national identity,” Kesler wrote. “In the tradition of the historic legionary movement, spirituality and the Romanian Orthodox Church are essential to the mix.”

Tara Mea’s publisher and sometimes unwitting contributors include allies in the divisive cultural wars over LGBT and same-sex marriage, as well as other hot-button social issues that animate the AUR, its founder George Simion, and critics of perceived Western permissiveness, including the Romanian Orthodox Church.

Around 85 percent of Romanians identified as Christian Orthodox in 2011, the latest available census results.

Tara Mea is an offshoot of efforts to promote Christian Orthodoxy through an online and print magazine called Familia Ortodoxa, which is published by the Association for the Defense of the Family and Child.

Familia Ortodoxa says of an older, sister publication that “the magazine aims to offer its readers a Christian understanding of everyday realities and the promotion of a traditional way of life.”

Tara Mea shares many editorial contributors with Familia Ortodoxa, and its writers in at least several cases also publish their work on online outlets that have been episodically restricted on social media for allegedly spreading false information.

The cover of the first issue of Tara Mea asked, “The Romanian Family — Where Is It?”

One article, titled Children — Ours Or The State’s?, is adapted from a 2017 blog post that invoked religion in the debate over a parent’s right to spank their children. The same article has since appeared elsewhere.

Five years later, Tara Mea’s version of the article is described as an “adaptation according to the Coalition For Family” and is signed by Radu Ursan. Ursan has written on issues from vaccination to LGBT disputes and the elevation or perceived affronts to national heroes for R3media, a site that has been restricted on social media in the past for spreading false information. He also takes a keen interest in AUR founder George Simion’s criticisms of Romanian government policy.

AUR was formed in 2019 as a Christian, family values party that also seeks to unite Romanian populations in the region, including through reunification with Moldova and potentially in other neighboring states. Voter frustration at corruption and economic malaise amid the COVID-19 pandemic springboarded it into the fourth-largest parliamentary party in the delayed 2020 elections. It fared even better among Romanian voters abroad, placing third with 25 percent behind the centrist USR-PLUS alliance and the National Liberal Party (PNL).

Founder Simion has been accused of scapegoating ethnic Hungarians, the LGBT community, and Jews to win votes. He has been barred from neighboring Moldova based on a request by that country’s intelligence services.

AUR has also fed on lingering resentment from an unsuccessful referendum in 2018 to restrict marriage to “a man and a woman” in Romania’s constitution. Led by a movement called the Coalition For Family, which was formed by dozens of NGOs in 2015, the referendum drive collected 3 million signatures and spurred long-lasting cultural divisions.

Pirvulescu likens Tara Mea’s themes to the Coalition For Family playbook. He describes a worldview that sees “Western aggression against the child through the human rights system.” Its references to pedophilia appear aimed at “so-called political correctness,” he says, a frequent target on the right but also, increasingly, among centrists in Europe. Such criticisms are also favored by the alternative religious right in the West and by the Kremlin under Russian President Vladimir Putin, he says, along with a mostly misplaced nostalgia for elements of Soviet and communist social policy — for example, on abortion.

In addition to Spain, Romanian expats have spotted Tara Mea on counters in shops that cater to Eastern Europeans in Rome and in Villafranca di Verona, in Italy, and in London, England.

A second issue appeared this week and included a focus on Romania’s Dacian heritage, a familiar topic of Russian propaganda that encourages notions of Romanian exceptionalism and detachment from European values.

Distribution appears to rely on the goodwill of shopkeepers. A saleswoman in a Polish-specialty shop in London said she knew nothing about Tara Mea’s contents but that when someone offered to give them copies, they thought it might attract Romanian customers. The story was similar in Villafranca, where a shopkeeper says someone claiming to be from a nearby church delivered two boxes of the magazine three weeks ago.

The owner of the grocery store in San Antonio, Spain, where Malina saw it, told her that she left it on the counter because she thought it would bring joy to local Romanians and Romanian-speaking tourists.

Not to Malina, whose sympathies don’t appear to lie with AUR.

“My thoughts went directly toward manipulation created by a new and growing political party in Romania that’s trying to get to the diaspora,” she says.

Written and with reporting by Andy Heil based on reporting by Oana Despa