Romania’s President Nicușor Dan has defended his decision to refer a new law tightening penalties for antisemitism and far-right propaganda to the Constitutional Court, arguing that vague definitions could chill free speech and force judges into arbitrary rulings. Speaking on Monday, Dan said the bill “lacks clear legal definitions, particularly regarding what constitutes a ‘fascist’ or ‘Legionary’ movement,” adding that it fails to clarify whether an organization honoring Romania’s anti-communist resistance should be considered “Legionary” if some of its members once belonged to that interwar current. The intervention—well within the president’s constitutional powers—came a week after he formally submitted the law for constitutional review, but quickly moved from legal technicality to political flashpoint.
The criticism has been swift and pointed. Leaders of Romania’s small Jewish community, legal scholars, and historians contend that the measure is both necessary and sufficiently clear, and that the greater danger lies in persistent impunity for hate crimes and extremist propaganda. Silviu Vexler, the Jewish community’s representative in parliament and the bill’s initiator, announced he would return his National Order of Merit in protest. “The Romanian President’s decision will encourage the continued promotion of leaders of extremist organisations and, inevitably, of antisemitism and all forms of extremism,” Vexler warned, framing the referral as a symbolic setback in a country still grappling with the legacies of homegrown fascism.
That history looms large. The Legion of the Archangel Michael—commonly known as the Legionary Movement—was a major fascist organization founded in the 1920s by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu. Combining extreme nationalism, religious mysticism, and virulent antisemitism, it rose to prominence in the 1930s and became notorious for political assassinations, pogroms, and a cult of martyrdom before being banned in 1941. The new law explicitly criminalizes Legionary activities and organizations, a move its authors say closes loopholes exploited by contemporary groups that sanitize or repackage interwar symbols and narratives.
Substantively, the bill passed by parliament on June 13 would toughen punishments for those who initiate, support, or participate in fascist, racist, xenophobic, or Legionary movements, introducing prison terms of three to ten years and the loss of certain civil rights. Romania already criminalizes the denial, justification, or minimization of the Holocaust with penalties of six months to three years, but the sponsors argue that the explicit treatment of Legionary activity is the key innovation—aligning the legal code with the country’s historical record and current threats. Supporters add that, in practice, prosecutors and judges have successfully applied earlier statutes against far-right extremism; the real shortfall, they argue, is not legal ambiguity but the gap between incidents and convictions.
Historian Mihai Demetriad echoed that line, rejecting the charge of vagueness and pointing instead to enforcement. “Romania has had previous legislation condemning fascism and far-right extremism, and prosecutors and judges have issued convictions based on it,” he said. “The problem is not lack of clarity in the law—but that too few convictions have been handed down compared to the number of actual cases.” In this reading, the constitutional referral risks delaying an urgently needed upgrade to the legal toolkit without solving the operational bottlenecks that let extremist propaganda circulate with minimal consequence.
For the president and his allies, the fault line is rule-of-law fidelity: imprecise definitions of “fascist” or “Legionary,” they argue, could entangle legitimate historical research, civic commemoration, or anti-communist remembrance in criminal proceedings, leaving courts to improvise doctrinal boundaries on the fly. Civil-liberties advocates sympathetic to that view warn that poorly drafted bans can backfire—either by chilling legitimate speech or by inviting constitutional challenges that ultimately weaken the state’s ability to prosecute genuine hate propaganda. The counterargument is that Romania’s legislature deliberately targeted propaganda, organization, and material support—not academic work or neutral discussion—and that courts already possess interpretive experience anchored in prior case law.
The debate is sharpened by demographics and memory politics. Romania’s Jewish community today numbers roughly 4,000, a fraction of the more than 700,000 who lived in the country before World War II. That disparity imbues contemporary policy choices with moral weight: the line between remembrance and rehabilitation is not merely academic. It also explains why Vexler’s resignation of a national honor carries symbolic force and why many historians view explicit criminalization of Legionary activity as a litmus test of Romania’s commitment to confronting its past.
Procedurally, the Constitutional Court will now assess whether the law’s definitions and sanctions meet constitutional standards of clarity, proportionality, and freedom of expression. If the court upholds the bill, the tougher penalties and explicit Legionary provisions will enter into force, handing prosecutors a sharper set of tools. If it strikes down parts of the law, parliament will face a choice: redraft definitions to satisfy constitutional scrutiny while preserving teeth, or risk sending a broader political signal that the state is retreating from the struggle against organized hate. Either way, the referral has elevated a quintessentially legal question into a national test of how Romania balances historical responsibility, free expression, and the practical demands of countering extremist propaganda in the present.
