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tion and a great deal of trouble for the coalition. The very birth of the Democratic Conven-
tion around the Civic Alliance, which was a prestigious anti-Communist non-governmen-
tal organization established by famous intellectuals dissidents in the Communist regime,
launched a program of moral principles that should govern post-Communist Romania.
Purging public officials who collaborated with the Communist Party apparatus or former
secret police was considered a priority action, so as to remove the main obstacles of transi-
tion to democracy and a market economy.
The contradiction between the economic and moral reform revealed itself soon after the
CDR took power. Harsh structural reform of the economy could not be delayed and badly
needed the full support of the population and some sense of solidarity among all political
forces. Otherwise there was a risk of failure. But maintaining solidarity and support was
hard to conceive as long as “moral issues” deeply divided the society.
As we have seen, some moral issues – like the 1989 revolution, bureaucrats inherited from
the Communist regime, property restitution and others – alienated one of the most im-
portant coalition partners, the Democratic Party. Disclosing the names of secret police
informers during the Communist years proved to be a sensitive issue even for the so-
called historical political parties (such as the Liberals and Christian Democrats). Later
events proved that important members of these two parties, who were former detainees
in Communist prisons after World War II, were obliged to compromise with the secret
police apparatus by torture and force, and that some of them had had to inform on their
own dissident inmates. Obviously some of these senior members of the historical parties
resisted as much as they could passage of legislation to search the secret police archives to
disclose the names of informers. Thus moral reform was transformed in fighting a ghost,
because ghosts are everywhere: nobody can see them, but everybody can talk about them.
Communist ghosts were even to be found in the house of the ghost hunters themselves.
Since ordinary people had to face the hardships of the economic reforms, they became less
and less interested in calls for moral reform.
The first governmental crisis was rooted in this discontent and divide within the govern-
ing coalition. One of the Civic Alliance’s prominent members, Valerian Stan, as head of
the control body of prime minister’s office, wanted to disclose corruption cases of gov-
ernments after 1990. But most of the PD ministers in 1997 were members of the cabi-
net between 1990 and 1991. Therefore, they asked for Stan’s resignation, but also became
suspicious about the intentions of the Christian Democratic prime minister. Were their
government partners planning to indict them for corruption and force them to leave the
coalition? Later on, the prime minister denied that he asked his subordinate to investigate
the corruption cases of PD ministers. As no one else assumed political responsibility, it
was thought that occult forces were manipulating Stan to act to undermine the solidar-
ity of the coalition. So this meant that Stan himself was part of the former secret police
conspiracy. Almost everyone forgot that the Stan was a prominent member of the Civic
Alliance, who had not ceased to promote moral reform principles no matter who was
found guilty. The fear of the former secret police and ex-Communist infiltration of the
government coalition soon turned into an obsession that paralyzed action and necessary
reform measures. When the first Christian Democratic premier was forced to resign to
rescue the coalition, the Civic Alliance, which had been the backbone of the Democratic
