Descriere
Post-communist Romanian democracy is undoubtedly, by virtue of constitutional and legal provisions, a militant democracy. It is the expression of a constitutional memory that has capitalized on the negative experience of the past in the constitutional text. At the same time, it can also be considered, in its „individual” form, a democratic tradition born in the interwar period and recently revived during the 2024-2025 presidential elections. Without a shadow of a doubt, between 1918 and 1938, Romania practiced a militant individual democracy. Although born out of necessity and urgency, this was not a variant of martial law, but a stand-alone approach by the rulers of the time to defend constitutional liberal democracy from the dangers posed by the illiberal and authoritarian far right. This article aims to demonstrate that the interwar experience of militant individual democracy can serve as an important reference point both for understanding the limits of defending liberal democracy against anti-democratic extremism and for finding an appropriate normative framework for contemporary democratic militancy.
