Former President Ion Iliescu, who turned 94 on Sunday and has not appeared in public since March 2017, when he went to the Prosecutor General’s Office, speaks to the Revolutionary Dossier in an interview years later about the irony on the Internet of of his old age: “I know the internet is full of memes about me, that hope dies second to last, etc.”

• Ion Iliescu speaks of a “healthy democracy that involves forgiveness and truth” / “I regret some episodes of the first years after the revolution. It was inevitable”

Ion Iliescu gave this interview to his advisor Ionuts Vulpescu, former PSD Minister of Culture and current deputy.

When asked about the importance of age in politics, Ion Iliescu said that “age gives you a measure of the line – a very thin one, by the way – between courage and stupidity, between stupidity and altruism, between merit and experience.”

• “I don’t think that living by some generally accepted standards is a way out: today, professionalization begins earlier, there are more jobs, families appear later. But age is important: maturity, emotionality, expectations.
• A word from Caragiale: they are old, sir! But this does not necessarily mean being retrograde, hyperconservative, or immobile.
• In politics, age defeats age: parties wear out, they have to meet new expectations without giving up themselves and their ideological identity, institutions risk becoming forms without content. Age should not be overdone. Throughout the ages, you need progressions. This is the simple mathematics of life.
• As a parenthesis, I know that the internet is full of memes about me, like that hope dies last, or that I was seen in the bank, on a loan for 30 years, etc. Some I appreciate if they have a sense of humor, that is, they are intelligent. The world does not begin with us and certainly does not end with us. Fair to any mortal,” Ion Iliescu said on the Ionuc Vulpescu Podcast.
• You can read the full interview here.

Ion Iliescu was born on March 3, 1930.

Iliescu has not appeared in public since March 2017, when he went to the Prosecutor General’s Office, which prosecutors cited in the Revolution case, which brought him to trial for crimes against humanity. In the meantime, the case was transferred between the Military Prosecutor’s Office and the Supreme Court, which in February 2023 decided to send the case to the Bucharest Court of Appeal on the grounds that it would be within its competence, as Ion Iliescu was not the President of Romania at the time.

• Revolution case, never-ending story: Supreme Court sends it to Bucharest Court of Appeal, citing lack of jurisdiction as Ion Iliescu was not president at the time

Although Ion Iliescu no longer spoke in public, he had a certain reaction in the public space. One of them was on December 30, 2019. Then he reacted to the government’s decision to liquidate the Institute of the Romanian Revolution headed by him. He told Mediafax that it was “unacceptable bullshit” and that he did not understand the motivation behind the move.

Also in December 2019, Iliescu reacted on his blog after Gela Voican Voiculescu, the deputy prime minister in the interim government of Petre Roman, who was brought to trial for crimes against humanity in the revolution case, was hit with a crutch in Troy with University, where he came to lay a wreath. At the time, Ion Iliescu commented that one of the slogans of the Revolution was “No violence!”, adding that what happened shows that even after three decades, reconciliation is not possible.