Members of the Parliament will have to decide whether they will allow candidates such as the infamous Dan Tanasă to become a member of the National Council for Combating Discrimination (CNCD).
The Romanian discrimination watchdog has seven seats up for grabs, and 26 candidates are vying for them. The palette of candidates is very colourful, including a former cop who was charged with selling stolen cars (and who is against gender theory, by the way), a homophobe Orthodox councilor, and the like.
We don’t have to introduce Dan Tanasă: We have written about his “anti-discriminative efforts” before. Through his association called the Civic Association for Dignity in Europe (ADEC), he has initiated hundreds of lawsuits against Hungarian and Szekler symbols and, as a result, Szekler settlements have had to remove flags and Hungarian inscriptions from state-owned institutions. His affiliation with the Romanian nationalist parties and a network of right-wing associations is obvious; we just have to consider last year’s unfortunate event on June 6 when a group of nationalists broke into a WWI-era Austro-Hungarian graveyard in the Úz Valley and forcefully inaugurated concrete crosses placed illegally in the cemetery. The whole story behind the shameful event can be read here.
Other candidates include the former president of the council, Csaba Asztalos, who is running for another mandate, and Andrei Diaconu, a Social-Democratic senator who is openly against the initiative to teach gender theory in Romania because “society is not ready for this theory.”
Then, we have Horia Grama, who stood for anti-Hungarian measures as a former prefect of Kovászna/Covasna County between 2001 and 2005 and is an openly anti-Hungarian figure, and homophobe Orthodox theologian Ionut Mavrich. The list continues with Luminița Gheorghiu, Ilie Dinca, Cristian Jura, Tatiana Sandu, Claudia Popa, Doru Frunzulica, Bencze Marta-Iozefina, Noni-Emil Iordache, Radu Potcoavă, Valentina Filofteia Şerban, Mădălina Tomescu and Daniela Tontsch.
Update: He didn’t make it.
Title image: Dan Tanasă. Image source: Tanasă’s Facebook page.
