Romania’s president delayed legislation against hate speech and pro-fascist rhetoric on Friday, prompting criticism and alarm among local Jews.
“The President’s Office has pushed Romanian Jews into a highly stressful situation,” Maximillian Katz, head of Romania’s Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism, told JNS on Monday following President Nicușor Dan’s decision to have the Constitutional Court review legislation that extended the country’s 2015 laws against hate speech.
In accordance with Dan’s initiative, the court is due to rule next week on whether the legislation aligns with the freedoms of speech afforded in the constitution. Unusually, Dan sent the law for legal scrutiny after it was passed by parliament on Friday.
Silviu Vexler, a lawmaker and the president of the Federation of the Jewish Communities of Romania, on Friday returned a state honor, the Medal of Merit, to protest the president’s decision to challenge the law. He said that without the legislation, Romania’s national plan for combating antisemitism would become ineffectual and should therefore be scrapped.
The president’s actions will “encourage the further promotion of the legionary [fascist] ideology, of the leaders of extremist organizations, inevitably, of antisemitism and all forms of extremism,” Vexler said in a statement.
Katz agreed that the president’s decision to review the law invites antisemitic discourse. Challenging the legislation puts Romanian Jews in a position where “we need to constantly explain and defend our right to not live with a constant outpouring of hate. Whenever we explain this, a new wave of hatred erupts, and in this case, it’s happening already,” Katz said.
The bill Vexler submitted was an update to legislation passed in 2015. It would introduce prison sentences for the promotion of antisemitism and xenophobia via social media platforms, including by glorifying the Iron Guard Legionnaires—allies of Nazi Germany during World War II.
On Monday, Dan reportedly defended the decision to challenge the legislation, explaining it was meant to avoid outlawing the honoring of “members of the resistance” to communism who had been part of the fascist, antisemitic Legionnaires movement in the past, the news site g4media reported.
The 2015 legislation was meant to address Romania’s rampant Holocaust denial and distortion, as well as the glorification of Nazi collaborators who helped murder Jews and others.
In a 2025 survey of knowledge about the Holocaust commissioned by the Claims Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in six countries, 53% of young Romanian respondents said that the number of Holocaust victims, six million, was exaggerated. The share of young respondents who said this in other countries was far smaller, at 33% in France and lower elsewhere.
Romania had the highest share (28%) of respondents who said fewer than 2 million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. Romania also led in the share of respondents who said the Holocaust was a myth (7% overall and 15% among young respondents).
In referring the legislation for judicial review, Dan said he supported limiting hate speech but added that the law does not clearly define who is a fascist or a Legionnaire, “leaving room for arbitrariness in the activity of the judicial bodies.”
He added, “Romanian society is strongly polarized, trust in state authorities is at low levels, and any action by the state that refers to this polarization in an unbalanced way increases social tension and distrust in authorities.”
