URR - a short history

The beginning of the party is placed, as a political idea, in the second week after the second round of the presidential elections of the year 2000.

Some of us took an interest in politics somewhat earlier, in the spring of 1999 when, feeling the danger of the reelection of PDSR with its vast clique of cronies we put together a consultancy team which we dedicated to the goal of preventing this reelection to happen.
Since we didn't want to attach ourselves at the time to any political party, we decided that the most effective way for us to pursue our goal was to support the President of the country, Mr. Emil Constantinescu, in his bid for reelection.
Our consultancy team had seven members, all independent consultants with proven track records and complementary skills which we deemed useful for the cause.
We presented our offer in writing to the President and followed up with a meeting on the 31-st of August. We made very clear to him not only our views on the subject at hand but also the fact that we don't want to become members of any political party and we don't want any compensation, financial or otherwise.
After a couple of months of mutual appraisal our cooperation started in February 2000, when three of us joined ASPEC, the NGO that was supporting the reelection of president Constantinescu. The cooperation ended in July 2000 when the president withdrew from the reelection race.
During our participation in ASPEC we tried to give this organization a culture and structure of a normal professional company, with clear roles and responsibilities, objectives and tasks, management controls and reviews. Because of the huge cultural discrepancies between our corporate type mentalities and those of the people working there, which came mainly from universities, NGOs and public service, the results of our cooperation were far below our expectations and we certainly bear a large part of the responsibility for this. At the beginning of August we pulled back from ASPEC and returned to our lives and jobs.

Some of us also tried for a brief period to cooperate with the PM of the time, Mr. Mugur Isarescu, who had just put up his name for the office of the President, but this cooperation was very short lived because of the big differences in our views.

When the second round of the presidential elections came we were put in the difficult situation to choose between two people whom we saw as the embodiment of evil and whom we held responsible for the dire situation of the country, especially for missing the huge opportunities the country had to change firmly and clearly to a capitalist democracy, like our neighbor former communist countries. Some of us voted for Mr. Iliescu, but we felt enormously deceived and betrayed. Others did not vote at all and this only added to our sentiment of anger and frustration since this deprived us of one fundamental democratic right.

The brutal aggression on this fundamental right that we so much cherished by the combined action of PDSR manipulation and CDR ineptitude were the straw that bends the camel for us. The following day we got together and concluded that enough was enough. After 10 years of false starts, hesitant mistakes, inconsistencies, absurd experiments, failures and reversals it was clear to us that the political class, in its entirety, was unable to provide the country with the solutions it needed.

We called upon each other and had our first meeting on Thursday evening, four days later. We were 9 then, and only 3 of the 9 had been through the quasi-political experience of 2000. We started by listing the values and principles we believed in, in order to understand if we make for a homogenous group and we can stick together. We liked what we saw in each other and so we started to meet weekly and put together the project of a new political party. Since then more people have joined the group, all without any previous political involvement. We decided upon a name, a logo, the main ideas of the statute, the expansion and communication strategies, the target group, the main message, and so on.

The longest and most difficult part was to put together the 10,000 signatures required by the law for the registration of a new party. Without any structure or organization to assist us we had to lean on every contact, every relative and every friend for help, so the process took almost 6 months, from February to August 2001, far more than we had initially planned.

The biggest and nastiest surprise would come from another direction, however. It started when we registered the complete documentation required by law (10,250 signatures, notified to the public notary, with an index of the database) at the Bucharest Tribunal on August 24 2001. Following closely political orders the delaying machine of the justice system started to grind us into dust, slowly and methodically, using all sorts of excuses (some would be comic if they were not tragic) to delay us far more than the 30 days mandated by law. So it took us another 6 months, from August 2001 to February 2002. Finally, on February 27-th 2002 the party was legally registered.

We dedicated the following months to the work of re-establishing the links and contacts we had lost during the long months of waiting and we planned the public launch on July 10-th. We contacted Mr. Cornel Nistorescu (whom none of us knew beforehand) and asked for his help in launching our initiative. We liked his publicly expressed views on matters of interest to us and we thought it would be a good match. It was indeed as he kindly accepted to help us after thoroughly understanding who we are and what we stand for.

We launched the party with a press campaign, avoiding a press conference that we thought was too easy to sabotage by the enormous power of the PDSR. Nevertheless their propaganda machine started immediately to spray us with mud and innuendo. We were associated within weeks with most of the dark figures that gravitate around Romanian politics, starting with Emil Constantinescu, continuing with Guse, Patriciu, Nastase and ending with Sorin Vantu.

The simple truth, maybe to simple to believe, is that there is no one behind us except ourselves, our own careers, lives, beliefs and ideas and the one and a half year long struggle to make this political project happen.
They are our source of motivation and drive and they move us towards our goal of creating a new breed of politicians in the Romanian politics, one that will rise to the challenge of the years to come.

Starting from July 2002 we took on this task of rebuilding the Romanian political class together with those that come along with us every day in our party, Uniunea pentru Reconstructia României - URR. We want to bring back the trust, respect, common sense, humility, altruism and dedication that would make us once again proud to be Romanians, in a way we haven't felt since December 1989...

Union for the Reconstruction of Romania - URR
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