Three Romanian boys have been expelled from the Romanian Gymnastics National Team in response to the horrific incident. They have been named in the press as well: Mihai Iustin, Andrei Titi, and Flavius Borca. The Resicabánya (Rešica) police are also reportedly investigating the matter.
The 15-year-old boy was allegedly tied to a radiator naked while the other gymnasts were chanting ‘ungure, ungure,’ meaning ‘Hungarian, Hungarian’ in English. It is unclear if legal action will be taken against the perpetrators.
Mihai Tîrnoveanu attempted to display a banner with the writing ‘Transylvania is Romanian land’ at a 15 March celebration attended by Foreign Minister Szijjártó of Hungary in Sepsiszentgyörgy. However, the banner was confiscated before the event, and the wannabe disruptor was arrested by local police.
The university’s public statement recalled that since 2019, researchers have been conducting excavations near the Transylvanian village of Valiora. Their findings include numerous bones from vertebrates that lived at the end of the Cretaceous period. Scientific analyses of the artefacts are still ongoing.
Bulgaria and Romania have taken an important step towards full Schengen membership: from March 2024, air and maritime transport will be subject to the rules of the free movement area. However, Austria has still not lifted its veto against full membership for Bucharest. For Hungary—and for the EU as a whole—enlargement of the area would be crucial for a number of reasons, and it is possible that Vienna will be persuaded by Budapest, which will soon hold the EU presidency.
‘The mamaliga (a typical Romanian boiled cornmeal dish) will not explode,’ Communist dictator Ceaușescu famously said in the 1980s, dismissing the potential of the forces that opposed him. But the discontent with the oppressive regime had been brewing for a long time by then, so the sparkle represented by the brave resistance of Hungarian Reformed pastor László Tőkés and his flock was enough to light the fire of the revolution all across Romania.
Senator Diana Șoșoacă, who recently had to form her own party after being expelled from her old group, shouted anti-Hungarian slogans while Senator Turos from RMDSZ, the party representing ethnic Hungarians, was making a speech about what the 1 December holiday meant to the Hungarians living in Transylvania.
The Hungarian-language version of the Brussels-based news site has since changed the title of their article. However, the cached version of their horrible faux pas is still available through a simple Google search.
There have been misleading press reports suggesting that now Hungary lags behind Romania, based on Eurostat’s fresh data that say that in 2022, Hungary’s GDP per capita at purchasing power parity was 76.6 per cent of the EU average, while in Romania, this ratio was 76.7 per cent. The economic researchers at the Nézőpont Institute investigated whether Romania had indeed overtaken Hungary in economic terms. ‘Based on Eurostat’s data, the answer is simple: no,’ researchers assert in a statement.
Although the unification made the dream of the Romanians come true, the aspirations of Transylvanian Hungarians for self-determination were ignored. The annexation of Transylvania to Romania was finally enshrined by the Treaty of Paris.