A leading figure in the revolutionary government has quit, suggesting discord in its highest echelons, and criticized the leadership for campaign efforts that try to undermine the opposition.
Silviu Brucan, a former communist who became the leading foreign affairs specialist in the new regime, announced his resignation Sunday from the National Salvation Front in a letter to the national news agency Rompres.Three days earlier, the front agreed to share power with opposition parties in a new Council of National Unity until elections set for May 20.
The front took control during the bloody December revolution that toppled communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed Christ-mas day after a summary trial.
In making his announcement, Brucan said he considered his mission fulfilled and that he believed all those who fought in the revolution "share my conviction that a strong opposition is absolutely essential to a real democracy" in Romania.
However, Brucan himself had been a target of opposition criticism. It was he who announced that the front, contrary to its initial pronouncements, would field candidates in the elections.
Bowing to public pressure, the front last week agreed to share power with the opposition until the elections and split into two groups - one to govern, the other to contest the elections.
After his ouster, Brucan quickly became the National Salvation Front's ideological beacon and was one its most outspoken figures. He is a former ambassador to Washington and one-time editor of the Communist Party daily Scinteia who first openly criticized Ceausescu after force was used to put down labor unrest in Brasov in 1987.
"Today, Feb. 4, I took the decision to retire from the leadership of the National Salvation Front because I consider my mission fulfilled," Brucan said in his letter.
He said he was worried about several "weak points of our new political life," including a certain apathy and a focus in the election campaign on adversaries rather than policies.
The stress on trying to undermine the opposition rather than to debate how best to solve Romania's many problems "threatens to reduce the contest to the lowest electoral traditions before World War II," he said.
Brucan said he worried that one of the key figures helping to form public opinion in Romania was formerly in charge of two propaganda offices "that were constantly promulgating Ceausescu's cult" and was a member of the Communist Party's now defunct Central Committee.
He did not identify the man.