Between Old and New Visual Strategies: The Visual Culture of the Greater Romania Party (1991-2000)

What does ultranationalism look like? What happens when a postsocialist party attempts to rebuild the nation by stitching together the visual languages of two authoritarian pasts? And how do citizens of a fragile new democracy interpret and internalise these images? This paper examines the visual culture of the Greater Romania Party (PRM) during Romania’s first post-Communist decade, arguing that its nationalist appeal relied as much on a carefully curated visual repertoire as on ideology. The paper looks at how the PRM and its leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, presented themselves through imagery. In a context marked by economic uncertainty, democratic fragility, and unresolved political memory, the PRM reactivated symbolic fragments from Romania’s interwar fascism and Ceaușescu’s national-communism, transforming them into a new aesthetic for the 1990s. Drawing on front pages of the România Mare magazine, party emblems, electoral posters, televised performances, and press photographs, the analysis focuses on four interconnected domains: the sacred nation, the charismatic leader, rallies, and anti-minority attitudes. Maps of Greater Romania paired with Orthodox motifs, portraits of Tudor framed as a paternal protector, and rallies that echoed both Legionary rituals and socialist choreography, reveal a visual culture shaped by decades of authoritarian representation that felt familiar to viewers. Rather than claiming ideological similarities between the Legion of Archangel Michael, the national-communist regime, and the PRM, the paper argues that PRM and Tudor drew aesthetic power from older visual traditions. The party did not invent a new ultranationalist visual culture. Instead, it revived and combined already existing ones. By looking at how the PRM made nationalism visible and emotionally resonant, this paper shows that visual culture is central to understanding the revival of ultranationalism in postsocialist Romania. It also suggests broader implications for how contemporary far-right, illiberal movements mobilise inherited aesthetics to reshape democracy across Europe today.