First president of Romania after the fall of the Ceaușescu regime who was later charged with crimes against humanity during the revolution
Ion Iliescu, who has died aged 95, served three terms as the elected president of Romania, setting one of the best examples in Europe of how former communist leaders could support democratic reforms and maintain social stability in their countries when the old system of repressive one-party rule crumbled.
Iliescu had revealed himself as a progressive during the harsh dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He was appointed head of the Communist party’s agitation and propaganda department in 1965, the year that Ceaușescu became party leader.
For more than a decade Iliescu served him loyally but gradually became disillusioned by Ceaușescu’s megalomania. Iliescu did not hide his views and he was forced to accept a series of minor jobs in provincial cities, though he was able to remained a member of the party’s central committee. In 1984 he suffered his final demotion by being given the post of running a technical publishing house.
There he could have remained, in obscurity, like many other minor party officials from modest backgrounds. Iliescu was born in Oltenita, a small southern town on the Danube. His father, Alexandru, was a railway worker who supported the banned Romanian Communist party and was imprisoned for four years during the second world war. His mother, Maria, was a Roma who left when Ion was an infant, and he was brought up by his stepmother and grandparents. He studied engineering for four years at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Back in Romania he joined the Union of Communist Youth in 1944 and the Communist party in 1953.
