Revitalization of Social and Civic Participation in Eastern Europe? Industrial Conflict and Popular Protests in Romania

At the beginning of 2017 mass protests against a reform of graft laws stroke major Romanian cities. They highlighted a trend of discontent of broad segments of the Romanian population with traditional political actors, that seemed to redefine the meaning of democratic decision-making and actual governance (Margarit 2017). These “anti-corruption protests” were widely perceived as being the peak of an ever-increasing spiral of unconventional political participation in this country (Rammelt 2017). However, despite the fact that Romania witnessed, until 2011, relatively strong mobilizations by labor unions and more industrial conflict than other countries in the region (Varga/ Freyberg-Inan 2015:682), their mobilization capacity seems to decrease over the last years. Further, popular protests and protests organized by labor unions and syndicates seem not to interact. While the former mainly rely on a salient anti-corruption and law and order mobilization frame, the latter mobilize around constituency oriented claims. The lack of cross-participation and spillover effects between the two, question the idea that the Romanian society has fundamentally changed in terms of social and civic activism. Based on frame analysis (Snow/ Benford 1988/ Lindekilde 2017; Johnston 2002), we hypothesize that a very subjective perception of political and social problems of popular protest participants, or of “recreative activists” (Gubernat/ Rammelt 2017), and the overarching corruption/ anti-corruption cleavage within the Romanian Society (Craciun 2017), are the main impediments to interaction between labor union protests and mass protests. The absence of cross fertilization combined with the absence of actual governance efforts, results, then, in a situation in which the social dimension within the political discourse and within popular protests seem to be getting lost. It appears reasonable to assume that the narrow claims of labor unions do not stimulate any resonance with mass protest participants, and that the characteristic of the latter exclude them from the constituency of the former. On the other hand, the law and order mobilization frame of recent mass protests is not compatible with the constituency oriented mobilization of labor unions. Apart from the in-depth study of the phenomenon in Romania, the comparative nature of this paper will enable us to refer to similar trends and developments in other countries and regions.