Half of Romania Believes Hungary Wants to Take Back Transylvania

Tamás Vaski 2021.03.30.

Half of Romania’s citizens believe Hungary’s politics towards Transylvania aims at the “tearing away” of the region, according to a survey conducted by INSCOP Research.

The Romanian polling company published its survey results on Monday. When asked whether they believe Hungary wishes to take Transylvania away from Romania, 49.5 percent of respondents said yes, 43.2 percent said no, and 7.4 percent either did not respond, or did not know what to respond.

Fact

After the disintegration of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War, ethnic Romanians in Transylvania proclaimed union with Romania, and the region became a part of the kingdom. Today, roughly 1.2 million ethnic Hungarians live in Romania, making up one of the largest ethnic minorities in Europe.

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In the fall of 1918, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire came to a dramatic end. In the last phases of the war, the Entente powers adopted the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination, and embraced the movements of unsatisfied nationalities within the dualist monarchy. The WWI defeat thus ultimately led to the dissolution of the Monarchy and of […]Continue reading

Another topic important to Hungarians, the survey asked if Romanians believe the rights of Transylvania’s national minorities should be protected. 87.2 percent responded yes, while 11 percent said no.

INSCOP also asked a few other interesting questions to those being surveyed. The poll found that more than half of Romanians believe that the entry of their country into the Schengen zone is being obstructed because of the economic interests of certain European Union countries. 43.5 percent believe Romania is not fulfilling the necessary obligations for entry.

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Local government leaders from Szeklerland are requesting the European Commission (EC) to put the Minority SafePack European Citizens’ Initiative back on its agenda after controversially turning it down in January. The Minority Safepack initiative fought for EU protection for indigenous national minorities in the bloc. Despite more than one million signatures collected across Europe, the […]Continue reading

78 percent believe that Romanians are viewed as second class citizens in the EU, 56 percent believe foreign corporations are responsible for Romania’s pollution, and more than 35 percent believe that the country’s highway construction is not going according to plan because foreign powers wish to obstruct Romania’s development.

Featured photo illustration by Edit Kátai/MTI