These are the biggest protests in Romania since the anti-communist revolution which it mirrors in many ways. The people spontaneously rose up against a government which tried to weaken anti-corruption despite the fact that the government adopted a series of populist measures. Protests happened across the country and were entirely peaceful, with the exception of a single group of hooligans attacking police forces in Bucharest in the first evening of protests, hooligans which many people consider to be instigators, a method used by the same party years ago to break other protests https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/europe/romania-protests-corruption.html
That masses of people demand and act on their democratic rights to protest and change their government is an enormous positive not only for Romania but for all the world to see (since it is badly needed in many other countries). While the effort to stop corruption - so obviously exposed in this Romania situation - is important and valuable, for it to succeed it needs to answer a key question: why is governmental corruption so widespread and endemic a problem in modern societies? If that question is not raised and answered, we will endlessly repeat our suffering from corruption and simply explode into mass actions such as those now in Romania again and again. Here, then, is my answer to that question: the capitalist economic system generates such ongoing inequality that it drives the minority of the rich to seek to buy and thereby control the political system to protect their wealth. There lies the core of why corruption is so endemic.
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