Some Fermi estimates of population structure suggest that 2020 is a turning point in Romanian politics.

As there are slightly more than 20M Romanians and we have almost 80 years life expectancy, one can estimate 250K people for each age slice. This is entirely consistent with a death rate around 1% per year: indeed every year about 200K Romanians die and about the same number are born. It also means that there are 4.5M minors, under 18.

For the past thirty years, after the 1989 revolution we have had democratic “free” elections. Nevertheless, all this time, the majority of the about 16M voters have had no “democratic” education. Indeed, most voters have finished high-school while Romania was still a communist dictature, being born before 1972. In 2020 there are still about 8M Romanians born before 1972, which amounts to about half the voters.

Age and education level are features strongly correlated with people’s political choices everywhere in the world. Also one person’s politics are quite stable. For example political campaigners rarely find any benefit in changing people’s convictions, they only show some success in targeting specific groups and bringing them to vote. It follows that the knowledge, beliefs and ideologies acquired in the formative years must be one of the most important determinants of later politics.

It is easy to accept that the 7.5M Romanians aged 30 or less, born after 1990, have a particular outlook on the past. And, if possible to define, the typical outlook of the voters, with a median age of about fifty, must be different from that of the overall population (median age about forty). This is especially true, given that the average age of people actually going to the polls is usually even higher. I think that the positive changes seen in last two elections in Romania are due to the fact that only now we have a majority of voters educated at least partially after the end of communism.

The age distribution in the Romanian population is strongly affected by the total criminalization of abortion in the period 1966-1989. As a consequence most people in Romania are about 40 years old, still consistent with my analysis. Also some people born at the end of the 60’s have had some university education after the fall of communism. But only about a quarter of Romanians have higher level of education and maybe quarter of the rest have not finished high-school, so numbers cancel out.

While a more detailed analysis is necessary to derive a more exact age distribution and correlation with politics, let us hope that, with more than half of voters educated in democracy, we are finally turning the page. 30 years has been long enough!