According to a survey conducted by INSCOP and commissioned by News.ro, almost 50% of Romanians believe that the communist regime was good for Romania, a higher percentage than 10 years ago. In addition, more than 46% of Romanians believe that life was better before 1989 compared to the current situation.

Evaluation of the communist regime

According to 48.1% of Romanians, the communist regime was good for Romania (compared to 45.5% in November 2013), while 42.3% held the opposite opinion (compared to 44.7% in November 2013). 9.7% of respondents do not know or do not answer this question (compared to 9.7% in November 2013).

Perceptions of the standard of living in the communist period

46.4% of Romanians believe that life was better before 1989 compared to the current situation (compared to 44.4% in November 2013), 34.2% – that life was worse (compared to 33.6% in November 2013 year), and 13.7% lived the same way (compared to 15.6% in November 2013). 5.7% of the total sample do not know or do not answer (compared to 6.4% in November 2013).

“I think that before 1989, life was better compared to the current situation, especially: people with primary education, inactive potentially active, residents of rural areas and from southern or eastern regions, those with lower incomes,” – shows the socio-demographic.

“Perhaps shockingly, almost half of Romanians say that the communist regime was good for Romania, and almost half say that life during the communist period was better than today. Objective reality and absolutely all data clearly indicate that today’s standard of living, national wealth, rights and freedoms are clearly higher than the situation before 1989. However, public perception is different, but there are explanations, some partly objective, others partly subjective, that fuel this acute sense of nostalgia. Among them: the strong conjunctural dissatisfaction of the population with the present, marked by successive crises of recent years, which culminated in galloping inflation, which seriously affected the standard of living, the uneven distribution of the national wealth of the present, which significantly increases the differences between the categories of poverty and the population with medium-high incomes, personal nostalgia of part of the population for the period of their own youth, the process of socialization and education of young people who learn from nostalgic sources about the illusory advantages of that period (safe work, housing insured by the state), stimulation of some myths of the communist period through aggressive campaigns of political vectors, especially in online spacious All this led to the mythologizing of the advantages of communism for ever wider sections of the population, which is currently fueling, against the background of the atrophy of collective memory, an unsuccessful political choice. Countering this trend is a broader responsibility that belongs to the intellectual, political, economic and mass media elites,” says Remus Štefuriak, director of INSCOP Research.

The survey was conducted by INSCOP Research on behalf of News.ro. The data were collected from November 20 to 27 by the CATI method (telephone interviews), using a questionnaire. The size of the simple stratified sample is 1100 people, representative of significant socio-demographic categories (gender, age, profession) for the non-institutionalized population of Romania aged 18 and over.

The maximum permissible data error is ± 2.95% with a confidence level of 95%.