Romania's Far Right Just Accidentally Made the Case for Civil Partnerships
A new anti-corruption law requires politicians' 'civil partners' to disclose their assets — despite Romania having no legal definition of a civil partnership. LGBTQ+ groups are using the irony to push Parliament toward a real law this September.
Romania’s Chamber of Deputies passed a new anti-corruption Integrity Law on August 5 with an unusual coalition behind it: the center-left Social Democrats (PSD) and the far-right nationalist AUR party. Buried in the bill’s disclosure requirements is a phrase that has Romanian commentators pointing out an inconvenient fact — the law requires the “spouses and civil partners” of high-ranking officials to disclose their assets and income. Romania has no legal category called a civil partnership. It doesn’t exist.
Who the law was actually aimed at
The provision wasn’t written with LGBTQ+ rights in mind. Romanian commentators, including G4Media journalist Dan Tăpălagă, read it as a targeted jab: President Nicușor Dan, elected in 2025 on a pro-EU platform, has a partner, Mirabela Grădinaru, whom he is not married to. Acting Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan is reportedly in a similar situation. AUR and its allies wanted those partners’ finances on the record — presumably to generate scrutiny or scandal — without particularly caring whether the legal mechanism to do so made sense.
It doesn’t, not yet. Romania has never passed a law defining or registering civil partnerships, for opposite-sex or same-sex couples alike. Writing “civil partners” into a disclosure statute doesn’t create the legal status; it just draws attention to the fact that Romania has spent years avoiding creating one.
“Aided by the PSD, the self-styled defenders of the traditional family — the extremists of the AUR party — have taken a significant step towards legalising civil partnerships with the new integrity rules,” Tăpălagă wrote. “Of course, this was not their intention… Romania is probably the last EU member state that still hasn’t recognised civil partnerships — due to enormous pressure from the Orthodox Church.” Commentator Elena Crângașu, writing in Cotidianul, put the double standard more bluntly: AUR has spent years insisting that couples without a legally defined “family” don’t deserve recognition — until a disclosure law made recognizing them politically convenient.
The years of nothing this sits on top of
The irony lands because of how much has already piled up. In 2023, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Buhuceanu and Others v. Romania that the state’s total refusal to offer same-sex couples any legal recognition — no marriage, no partnership, nothing — violated their rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Romania was ordered to fix it. It hasn’t. The case remains under the Council of Europe’s “enhanced supervision” track, the more serious of its two non-compliance categories.
Two civil partnership bills, Pl-x 152/2019 and Pl-x 153/2019, have sat blocked in the Chamber of Deputies’ Legal Commission since 2019. This spring, the advocacy group MozaiQ, working with content creator Alina Greavu, gathered more than 100,000 signatures from Romanians backing civil partnership legislation and delivered the petition to Parliament with the backing of 93 civil society organizations. PSD leader Sorin Grindeanu said publicly this year that he was “surprised” Romania still hadn’t complied with the ECHR ruling and pledged to act on it if he leads the next government. None of it has moved a bill out of committee.
Romania is now among the last handful of EU member states with zero legal recognition for unmarried couples of any kind, same-sex or otherwise — a list that also includes Bulgaria.
What comes next
MozaiQ is treating the Integrity Law’s accidental phrasing as leverage rather than a punchline. The organization has called on Parliament to take up the stalled civil partnership bills when its next session opens in September, arguing that lawmakers can’t credibly write “civil partners” into a disclosure law while refusing to define what a civil partner legally is.
Whether that argument moves Pl-x 152 and 153 out of committee after six years is an open question — Romania’s Legal Commission has absorbed worse pressure than an embarrassing headline before. But the mismatch is now on the record in the country’s own statute book: a law that treats civil partnerships as real enough to police for corruption, in a country that still won’t let couples register one.
