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
Censorship in Communist Romania the loosest during the early period of Ceauşescu's rule, which ended with the July Theses. The purpose of the censorship apparatus was to subordinate all the aspects of the Romanian culture (including literature, history, art and philosophy) to the Communist Party's ideology. All features of the Romanian culture were reinterpreted according to the regime's ideology, and any other interpretations were banned as forms of "bourgeois decadence". Under Nicolae Ceauşescu’s second communist Romanian regime, propagandist material was the only available information to the public across the country and even this propagandist material (spread mostly via the national television and the party’s