By Cristian Preda, University of Bucharest.

This article was first published in the review Comunitatea liberală 1848 on the 4th of March 2025. Link to the original publication, in romanian: Să venim împreună și să facem un push mare – Comunitatea Liberala.

Even if she was in the spotlight for only a few days, Anamaria Gavrilă left us with something very precious. No, I’m not referring to her 112 call asking the police for help to escape the group of journalists who wanted to find out whether she was still running for president. The POT (Partidul Oamenilor Tineri; Romanian Youth’s Party) leader gave us something far more valuable for understanding the era we live in.

The gem lies within the words she uttered in a phone conversation. She was called by Realitatea TV —recently self-proclaimed as « the people’s television »— to explain whether she was withdrawing from the race for Cotroceni. Well, in response to this simple question, Gavrilă said the following: “I know it’s delicious to talk about positions, but this is about making all Romanians, even those from the other side, understand that it’s a difficult situation for Romania. We all need to come together and make a big push to restore constitutional order and freedom in Romania. We all need to go beyond parties and any discussion.”

What caught people’s attention was her use of so-called « Romgleza, » a mix of words from two languages as different as Romanian and English. Expressions like “this is about,” “to come together,” or “to make a big push” reveal an evolution in speech that extends beyond the political sphere. A superficial Americanization of our public life, which has taken place since 1989, has changed the way our fellow citizens express themselves. While the nationalist generation of C. Vadim Tudor and George Pruteanu still upheld the ideal of a correctly spoken Romanian language, the recent nationalist wave writes without diacritics and sprinkles Americanisms among words recorded in the official Romanian dictionary (DEX). The fantasy of a connection to Dacian or Getic origins completes the picture.

But that’s not the most important takeaway from the POT leader’s intervention. What truly matters is her project to establish constitutional order without parties and without too many words. No one has expressed this totalitarian dream more clearly since King Carol II, who abolished political parties by decree and then created the National Renaissance Front, which he legitimized in 1939 through elections where all deputies and senators wore uniforms. Gavrilă is the bearer of a project that undermines democracy.

She asks us to unite “for a big push,” meaning to trample on freedom of association, the right to free speech, and political competition.

No, thank you much, we do not need așa ceva… (No, thank you very much, we don’t need that…; editor’s note).

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Cristian Preda is a professor in political science at the University of Bucharest and a former MEP (2009-2019). His research areas are large, from political regimes, to political history, elections and party politics.