Braver New World

The Countries Daring to do Things Others Won't

For three years, I embarked on a global journey looking at best practice in 10 countries and cities. It was eye-opening, and it impelled me to put to one side (against all my instincts) the professional pessimism that has defined my analysis of international affairs.

The result is ‘Braver New World’.

I looked, inter alia, at Taiwan’s cost-effective, popular and speedy health service; an approach to social housing that Vienna has been pursuing for a century; the remarkable turnaround in Costa Rica’s environment, to Finland and its schools, to India and mobile apps and electronic payment systems that have emancipated small traders and farmers.

I ended my voyage in, of all places, a town in western Romania, Timisoara. Why so?

What follows is an adapted and abbreviated extract from my final chapter.

I hope you enjoy the book; please do buy it - it’s on pre-sale ahead of official release (first in English) on April 16. Please engage with it; let me know any thoughts, observations, criticisms. Please spread the word. I hope it helps to galvanise liberal democracies to display some courage in decision-making. Because, without it, our system is over.

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When you hark back to the great revolutions of 1989, the year that gave Europe and the world so much hope, your thoughts don’t immediately turn to Timișoara. But they should, because in this small city in western Romania began the uprising that led to the downfall of the tyrannical Nicolae Ceaușescu.

I’ve come here to talk to the mayor, a German – yes, German. Dominic Fritz wants to turn the place around and, like so many mayors in so many places, is trying to stave off a return to the far right. He has invited me to speak at a conference on democracy attended by representatives of dozens of European cities, and by his close ally Nicușor Dan, the newly elected president of Romania.

The day before I arrived, in late September, the results of parliamentary elections had just come through from Moldova, the former Soviet state across the border to the east. Remarkably, given the relentless misinformation and bribes offered to voters by pro-Moscow oligarchs, Moldovans opted for the main pro-European party of president Maia Sandu. If she had lost, Vladimir Putin would have gained another important foothold in the heart of Europe.

The presidential elections in Romania in late 2024 were even more controversial. A previously marginal extreme figure by the name of Călin Georgescu, who had single-digit support in opinion polls, came from nowhere to pole position in the first round.

Days before the run-off vote, the Constitutional Court annulled the vote and banned Georgescu from standing. His supporters took to the streets; the country was in ferment. Five months later, Dan, a diminutive mathematician turned activist, was elected. But the situation is fragile – and the past continues to prey on the present.

Before embarking on the conference, I want to absorb as much of the history of 1989 as I can. It’s not easy because there is little signage, as if the locals are still hesitant about confronting their demons.

And so, I take a guide. We start in the south of the city at the church of a dissident priest called László Tőkés. When news emerged on December 16, 1989, that he was about to be banished to a remote rural parish for giving an interview to Hungarian TV that was critical of the regime, a small group of people tentatively showed up outside his home. This was no organised dissident movement, but somehow a quiet protest turned into a fully fledged revolt.

We walk for nearly two hours along a route that eventually (so I’m told) will be inaugurated as Revolutionary Road. We go close to the building that housed the dreaded security service, the Securitate – now the office of the local TV station. We continue past the spot where a lone woman, carrying a string bag on each arm filled with bread, was run over by an armoured personnel carrier, and on to the local Communist Party headquarters, which had been designed in the 1930s as a school for training housemaids.

We end back in the centre, in Liberty Square, where soldiers opened fire on the crowd. They did so from a two-storey, 18^th-century building that was originally an Austrian guards’ house. It was taken over by the Romanian defence ministry and recently lent to the culture ministry to build a museum to the revolution. Except they haven’t. The plaster is fading, and the place is padlocked.

On one side of the facade is a small plaque to the first martyr of the revolution, a woman called Lepa Bărbat, who was gunned down in front of her husband and daughter. Her body was then spirited away, along with others’, to be secretly cremated – against Romanian Orthodox tradition – in a bleak spot outside the capital, Bucharest.

This small memorial is a start, but there is much more yet to do to honour the dead. Nothing prepares me, however, for what I’m about to see next.

On the other side of the Garrison Command Building, as it was known, is another plaque. It is dedicated to the “heroic people of Timișoara” who died “fighting for freedom” and comes from a certain Donald J Trump, that great defender of liberty.

It was presented to the city towards the end of Trump’s first term, not by the president himself but by the American ambassador, to mark the 30th anniversary of the revolution in December 2019. Some people here told me they’d like to take down his kind paean to democracy, but fear that for obvious political-intimidation reasons they can’t. It’s one thing not to win the Nobel peace prize; it’s quite another to be commemoratively cancelled.

More than 1,100 people died across Romania in the revolution. Unlike Poland, the Czech Republic and other states, there was no hero in the mould of Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel. It would take more than a decade longer for the old regime to be properly flushed out. There was no clean break. Many of those who profited from the old system continued for years to wield influence in the new. Some still do.

And some of those who risked their lives for democracy now denounce it. The story of Daniel Zăgănescu is emblematic. In December 1989, he was the first person to jump on top of a tram close to Tőkés’s home, stopping traffic and declaring: “I am not afraid of the security, down with Ceaușescu”.

And now? Zăgănescu’s Facebook posts are filled with conspiracies and support for George Simion, the far right candidate narrowly beaten in Romania’s recent and compromised elections. Just hours after the conference I had attended, he liked a post that contained a photograph of Dan and Fritz, with the words: “The de facto president of Romania, together with slaves and his autistic puppet. This tent of filth has put the services and the masters of Brussels at the top of the country.”

It is a well-trodden route; anti-communist activist turns Putin fan and denouncer of the west. Viktor Orbán next door in Hungary is the most accomplished practitioner of this art.

Many people have developed a nostalgia for the old times, convinced that under Ceaușescu, at least everyone had something. It is a dangerous myth, but thanks to Kremlin bots and Silicon Valley platforms, it is powerful.

Yet throughout my stay, I detect a steely determination among many people, a courage that seems often elusive in more comfortable western European states. Perhaps the Brits, the French, the Germans feel their democracies are so long established, their checks and balances so strong, that they are not in danger. We know, courtesy of the US, where such complacency leads.

Romania is pushing back, nowhere more so than in Timișoara. It is doing what it can to be a good European citizen.

Its term in 2023 as European Capital of Culture gave the city new confidence. For most of its 900 years, this has been, as the blurb puts it, “a mosaic of multiculturalism”, a plae once held by the Ottomans, then the Habsburgs, where Hungarians and Germans used to dominate and where people of different religions lived relatively harmoniously.

This city of 300,000 people, which is situated close to the borders of Hungary and Serbia, is now plugged into tourism networks across Europe. Artists have come from everywhere and have left a legacy of free festivals and exhibitions all year round. The tourism board has come up with a snappy logo: “Free City, Free Spirit”.

Yet this openness is fragile. The Trump/Putin axis that is taking such a hold on so much of Europe is instilling fear. One city official recalls the weeks around the cancelled elections and near-takeover by the right: “We were paralysed. None of us could sleep or eat. We were really scared.” Business conferences were cancelled; visitors stayed away.

In Fritz, Timișoara has a mayor who is prepared to confront the past, take on his detractors and try to build something different. He’s not one of the many Romanians with German heritage, but a fully fledged German from the Black Forest with no previous connection – and with a Chinese wife. In other words, he personifies everything the nationalists loathe.

“I like to watch the shock on visitors’ faces when they realise how much their preconceptions about Romania differ from the reality,” he says to me by way of welcome. “I too grew up with the stereotype of Ceaușescu, Dracula, orphanages and corruption.”

He first came here in 2003, doing a year’s voluntary work in an orphanage for a Jesuit organisation. He returned to Berlin, ending up in 2016 as office manager for Horst Köhler, a former German president.

Three years later, he handed in his notice to go back to Timișoara to stand in the mayoral elections – a right that all EU citizens have in all countries, if they have been granted residency, but which almost none have the wherewithal to try. In September 2020, against the odds, he won with 55%, ushering in a new era and new politics. And remarkably, in the face of sustained attacks, he was re-elected four years later.

As well as being mayor, he is now head of one of the national parties. He is being touted as a potential president of the country (his denial of such ambition is accompanied by a knowing smile). For him to be able to stand, his application for citizenship will have to come through in time, and there are fears that some in the old bureaucracy in Bucharest will not be in a hurry to grant it.

In the meantime, he’s continuing to use what powers he has to tackle an entrenched bureaucracy, introduce change – and, in his many walkabouts around the city, convince inhabitants that there is a positive way of doing politics.

One initiative, which has been going for over three years, is called participatory budgeting. Part of the city’s budget is allocated to a process in which citizens can club together and propose projects for improving their localities. These plans are worked up with the help of officials into formal bids, which are submitted to a jury of nine people – five council officers and four people from civic society groups. A small number are then submitted to a public vote.

In 2024, 4m Lei was distributed to 19 projects, including a children’s playground, a cycle route, better lighting. That’s around £700,000 in total, an average of £40,000 per scheme. The number of people voting (online only) is increasing, as are the number of projects and the amount allocated. It’s still small – it’s not going to change the world – but it’s a start.

He is also greening the city courtesy of money from the EU, introducing cleaner and better public transport. He has been unapologetic about the multi-ethnic nature of the city – something that, in Romania as elsewhere, is now a divisive issue. He also cites rapid response and planning. Four days after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he summoned city departments and civil society organisations to prepare for an influx of refugees, a whole month before the EU cranked into gear.

Shortly before the 2024 municipal elections, Fritz saw that his poll ratings had tanked. He and his advisers concluded that he needed to get out more and to listen harder. “You must identify the problem before it hits you. I tell people candidly that it will take time to turn things around because of the corrupt elites that came before me.”

To prove his point, he has ordered the destruction of 100 buildings, construction sites or plots that were illegally “privatised” by people under the communist system. They’ve been turned into parks or made accessible to the public. “I name and shame my enemies,” he adds. “We must fight the old system and the fake anti-system.”

If Fritz makes it on to the national stage, the stakes will be much higher, the dangers greater. In January 2022, shortly after he had been elected, his office was alerted to a commotion down the corridor. Simion, the far right MP who went on to be pipped to the presidency in 2025, had stormed into the council building.

With a posse of thugs in tow, he marched up the stairs, chanting “come out, you dirty dog” and “this is not your city”. The solitary elderly security man would have been no match, but the group decided to go no further. Simion had made his point, courtesy of social media of course.

Fritz immediately put a live video post on Facebook, telling voters they shouldn’t feel intimidated. “They are looking for all kinds of ways of taking me out of here,” he reflects. I choose not to press him on what he means.

I ask myself: if a relatively small city in a relatively small country, with few of the underpinnings of democratic stability, can show courage, not look over its shoulder, and instead seek innovative ways of improving lives, why can’t we all?

Maybe, though, that’s the wrong way of framing the question. Maybe it is because they are aware of the fragility of their project that they fight so hard for it. By contrast, more established democracies tinker and bicker, seemingly unable to meet the many present and future challenges that they face. Many of these governments have shown a poverty of ambition and aversion to risk. They have been mired in fear, but it is the wrong kind of fear.