INSCOP Survey. Two-thirds of Romanians say Ceaușescu was a good leader: “The catastrophic percentages that mythologize life under communism are not just the result of a natural phenomenon”

66% of Romanians believe that former communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu was a good president for the country. 24% of Romanians believe that he was a bad leader for Romania, and 7.8% say they do not know how to appreciate this, according to an INSCOP survey presented by sociologist Remus Ștefureac.

He describes the data as “unimaginable” that 66% of Romanians believe that Nicolae Ceaușescu was a good leader. The percentage comes from the study “Population Perception Regarding Communism. Landmarks of Nostalgia”. The data for the study were collected in July 2025, on a sample of 1,500 respondents, with an error of +/-2.5%.

“With all the failures of the present, with all the social and economic dissatisfaction of a part of the population that amplifies the regret for communism, the catastrophic percentages of the population that mythologize life under communism are not just the result of a natural phenomenon,” Remus Ștefureac wrote on Facebook.

He says that this percentage is a “direct consequence of the information war we are in, of at least 10 years of serious active measures directly coordinated by a hostile power, waves of disinformation, lies and grotesque manipulations propagated on all channels of information multiplication, but especially on social networks.”

“A campaign of destabilization and social vulnerability that has not been fought by the state or society, neither by the public nor by the non-public sphere. A campaign against which we have not built capabilities nor allocated resources to build the right antibodies that we can only find in the attachment to freedom, in good governance, in sincere patriotism, brother with integrity, with honesty and common sense, not with aggression and imported violence,” claims Ștefureac.

The complete data of the study - conducted in partnership with the Institute for the Investigation of Crimes of Communism and the Memory of Communist Exile (IICCMER) - will be published on Tuesday, the INSCOP director also announced.