Democratic Alliance of Hungarians president under attack in Romania

According to Mikó Imre Minority Rights Legal Aid Service, Hunor Kelemen, the president of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR/RMDSZ) has been harassed for days in the Romanian media for declarations he made regarding the upcoming centennial of the 1918 Great Union, and is now facing threats from civil organisations, as well as individuals, who demand that his Romanian citizenship be taken away. Nationalistic rage is also rampant on social media, where the president of UDMR/RMDSZ is being labelled a traitor and a nobody, simply for expressing an opinion and reaffirming the position of the party, which was expressed numerous times beforehand.

In an interview that he gave last week, Hunor Kelemen declared, among other things, that the Hungarian community in Romania cannot and does not want to celebrate the centennial of the formation of the modern Romanian state. Spirits in the Romanian mainstream media instantly flamed up, with reporters and opinion-makers calling the president of UDMR/RMDSZ a traitor.

One organisation, the National Coalition for Modernising Romania, went as far as threatening to initiate the withdrawal of Kelemen’s Romanian citizenship. Such a measure would be both absurd and unconstitutional. First of all, as a citizen and as the president of UDMR/RMDSZ, Hunor Kelemen has the right to express an opinion and to speak in the name of his party. Secondly, according to the Constitution of Romania, one cannot be stripped of their citizenship, if he/she acquired that citizenship by birth. Not content with this, the organisation demanded that the Order of the Star of Romania be revoked from Hunor Kelemen, who, according to them, “questions the existence of the Romanian state, its laws, history, culture and national identity”.