Nazi insults targeting Romanian president enrage German officials
Tensions flared in Romania this week after a politician from the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD) posted a video on social media comparing the country’s president to Adolf Hitler.
The central focus of the attacks is Romania’s German minority, sometimes called Transylvanian Saxons, and above all its most prominent representative, President Klaus Iohannis.
Last month, Senator Liviu Pop, the former education minister, called the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania (DFDR) a Nazi organization. For years, the liberal-conservative Iohannis was chairman of the DFDR, a group established for German minorities in 1989 after the fall of communism.
PSD Labour Minister Lia Olguta Vasilescu also joined in on the Nazi comparisons after Iohannis sharply condemned the harsh police crackdown against peaceful protesters in Bucharest’s Victoria Square on August 10. “Cheeky, as a German, to speak of attacking [people] with gas,” she said.
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(Klaus Iohannis photo: pnl.ro)
