Ion Iliescu
Ion Iliescu was the communist official, out of favour with Ceausescu for twenty years, who appeared on television on 22 December 1989 as the leader of the National Salvation Front that took power when the dictator fled, presided over the trial and execution of the Ceausescus on Christmas Day, won the election of May 1990 with eighty-five per cent, and in June 1990 brought ten thousand miners from the Jiu valley to Bucharest to beat the students in University Square, which killed six and made him, for the rest of his life, the man the revolution had been stolen by. He was president for eleven years in two stretches, took Romania into NATO in 2004, and was indicted in 2018 for crimes against humanity over the deaths of December 1989, a case still unfinished when he died at ninety-five. He was born in 1930 in Oltenita, the son of a railway worker and communist, studied hydraulic engineering in Moscow, where he knew Gorbachev, and rose through the youth movement to be minister of youth in 1967 and a secretary of the central committee. Ceausescu demoted him in 1971 for objecting to the cultural revolution he brought back from China and Korea, and he spent the next eighteen years in provincial party jobs and, from 1984, as head of a technical publishing house. The Front's proclamation on the night of the 22nd, read by Iliescu from the television studio, promised free elections and the end of the dictatorship, and the Front then turned itself into a party and won everything. It took the presidency, the parliament, and the constitution of 1991. The miners came three times, in January, February and June 1990 and again in September 1991, when they brought down his prime minister Petre Roman. He lost in 1996 to the rector who led the opposition, the first change by ballot, and came back in 2000 against the nationalist Vadim Tudor in a run-off the country held its nose for. The second term was the invitation to NATO in 2002, membership in 2004, and the closing of the EU negotiations. Barred from a third term, he was a senator and the honorary president of the Social Democrats, and the prosecutors charged him in 2018 with the deaths of 862 people killed after the Front had taken power, in the confusion it had spread about terrorists. The trial had not reached a verdict when he died in August 2025.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2025 CE
- Nationality: Romanian
- Roles: president, politician
