Traian Băsescu

Traian Băsescu is a Romanian politician who served as President of Romania for two terms from 2004 to 2014, having previously been mayor of Bucharest from 2000 to 2004 and minister of transport in the early 1990s. He was born on November 4, 1951, in Basarabi, Constanța County, on the Romanian Black Sea coast, into a family of modest means. He trained at the Mircea cel Bătrân Naval Institute in Constanța and served for nearly two decades as a merchant-marine officer, rising to ship captain.

His political career began in the months after the December 1989 revolution that ended the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu. He joined the National Salvation Front and served as minister of transport in successive governments through the early 1990s. He left the Front for the Democratic Party in 1992 and led that party from 2001, taking it through a series of mergers that produced the Liberal Democratic Party, the main center-right vehicle of his presidency.

His 2004 presidential victory over Adrian Năstase was followed by a turbulent decade in office. Romania joined the European Union on January 1, 2007, during his first term, and he survived two attempts by parliament to suspend him from office — in 2007 and again in 2012 — both of which were referred to popular referendums that failed to remove him. He was a vocal advocate of judicial reform and anti-corruption prosecutions, positions that drew strong support and equally strong opposition within the Romanian political class.

His post-presidential years included Senate service from 2016 to 2019 with the Popular Movement Party. In 2019 the Constitutional Court ruled he had collaborated with the Securitate, the communist-era secret police; he denied the conclusions and contested the case. He largely withdrew from front-line politics in the early 2020s while continuing to comment on Romanian affairs.

His name Traian is the Romanian form of the Latin Traianus, the name of the Roman emperor who conquered Dacia, the territory of modern Romania, in the early second century AD. The name is common in Romania for its national-historical resonance, and he carries it as his legal given name.