Romania’s protests - from social justice to class politics

Romania was swept at the beginning of February 2017 with the “largest protests since the fall of communism”. The protests were widely covered in the Western press, which generally took the liberal line that the protests represented the Romanian people’s struggle for “democracy” against the widespread “local corruption”, prompted by the scandalous attempt of the current government to “decriminalize corruption” [2]. An undertow of the same interpretation looked at the protests as a democratic revival of the struggles against communist totalitarianism from 1989.