History of Romania since 1989 unstable coalitions which have been subject to similar allegations. During the period Romania has become more closely integrated with the West, becoming a member of NATO in 2004 and of the European Union in 2007. 1989 marked the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. A mid-December protest in Timișoara against the eviction of a Hungarian minister (László Tőkés) grew into a country-wide protest against the Ceaușescu régime, sweeping the dictator from power. On 21 December, President Nicolae Ceaușescu had his apparatus gather a mass-meeting in Bucharest downtown in an attempt to rally popular support for his regime and publicly condemn
Nicolae Malaxa Nicolae Malaxa Nicolae Malaxa ( – 1965) was a Romanian engineer and industrialist. Born in a family of Aromanian origins in Huşi, Malaxa studied engineering in Iaşi (at the University of Iaşi) and Karlsruhe (at the Polytechnic University). Late in his life, Petre Pandrea, a Romanian intellectual who was for long a member of the Communist Party and later became a victim of the Communist regime, wrote a memoir which, in part, dealt with Malaxa's biography, recording it with a dose of hostility. In it, he indicated that Malaxa's father died a young man, and that Nicolae was kept in