Romanian Civil Society and Its Active Role in the 2004 Elections: From Monitoring to Blackmail Potential

Civil society has proven outstanding capacities of involvement in 2004 general elections in Romania, and put a remarkable pressure on the political society. This paper aims to discuss the consequences of such involvement for both the political and civil society. We also investigate the conditions that have favoured a successful challenge of the main political actors by the most visible civic advocacy organizations. Further, we search how far can go an actor from the civil society into the lands of the political society. In the end, we hang in a balance the achievements and the failures of the civil society active involvement in the game of elections. 1.1. Civil society – general considerations Twenty five years ago civil society began to attract the spotlights of international and regional (from Eastern Europe) specialists and governments. It was more and more clear that civil society has the capacity to promote interests and ideas different from the official ones in totalitarian or autocratic regimes. Eastern Europe was about to experiment how movements generated and organized by civil society organizations (trade unions and churches) are dynamically generating the regime change. Civil society is a widely used concept not only in political science but also in politicians’ discourses and media analyses. In East Central Europe civil society importance was assessed since Solidarity Polish trade union creation and opposition activities in the ‘80s. The role of civil society as a catalyst in 1989 communist regime fall is widely recognized. During the transition period civil society was considered almost a panacea for consolidation of democracy. Although the concept of civil society is very used, its meanings are not always clearly underlined. In our paper we consider civil society as the realm of “all social groups that are or can be understood as voluntary and noncoercive, thus excepting only the family whose members are not volunteers, and the state, which, even if its legitimacy rests on the consent of its members, wields coercive power over them” (Walzer, 2002: 35). Thus, civil society embraces organizations like trade unions, religious organizations – including churches, political interest groups unorganized as parties, civil rights NGOs. Often, in a very restrictive approach, usually endorsed by international assistance for the