Michael I Of Romania Obituary

King Michael of Romania, who died this Tuesday aged 96, was the man my neighbour from my childhood, a woman who lived half her life under communism, was always mocking for the way he spoke. Another neighbour, although around the same age as the first one — whom she couldn’t stand, by the way — had a small portrait of the king on her living room cabinet.

This conflict perfectly puts in a nutshell how the exiled king was seen by Romanians even decades after he abdicated.

This article is the most thorough I’ve read, because it presents the person behind the title and the political context during WWII from Romania’s perspective, while pointing to the relevant moments in the king’s life.

“Trapped between two giant war machines, he was eventually ousted by the Soviets in 1947, having helped end his country’s alliance with the Nazis three years earlier. Michael’s decisive arrest of the Romanian dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, an ally of Hitler’s, on 23 August 1944, and his subsequent ability to carry the Romanian army with him against the Germans, was a boost for the allies on the eastern front.”

“Democratic institutions are not governed by laws alone, but also by ethics and a sense of duty”, the king said in a 2011 Parliament speech. A day after his death, during national mourning, the justice laws were being butchered by the Social Democrat Party (PSD). They want to put the prosecutors under the control of the Ministry of Justice, because so many of the party’s members are being investigated for corruption. The Opposition managed to stop them on Wednesday, due to a procedural loophole, but not before facing the assault of a Social Democrat, who unleashed a wave of sexist profanities against an Opposition female member. The PSD is now changing the internal regulation of the Chamber of Deputies, so any loophole is eliminated. Massive demonstrations are expected today in Bucharest.