Ion ȘTEFANOVICI, President of CAPDR: “January 14. 44 Years. A World in Reconstruction”

When I began my professional path in 2003, through an internship at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Romanian Agency for Foreign Investments, I believed I was entering my true professional life.

Today, after more than two decades, I understand that moment as the first stage of a preparation within an era that has exhausted its own model.

An entire generation was shaped in a time that lived off inertia, while the world was preparing its rupture.

Romania passed through this period as a territory caught in a circuit without historical direction.

Roads, networks, buildings, and utilities were built. The skeleton was constructed. At the same time, the forces that give strength to a nation—industry, technology, research, and value chains—were dismantled and relinquished. The country became an infrastructure without productive power, a space of transit and consumption within a global economy that creates its value elsewhere.

In economic terms, capital moved from production to extraction and external valorization by third-party states. Raw materials leave. Energy leaves.

The land is exploited in favor of foreign companies. The workforce leaves.

Profit accumulates outside the national territory. Romania functions as a supply perimeter for the “centers” that control technology, finance, and industrial chains.

This is the logic of peripheral capitalism: whoever controls production also controls the future.

The state reflects this loss of substance. The Presidency, Parliament, and Government exist as administrative mechanisms.

The strategic nerve of decision-making has thinned. Historical direction has dissolved into a present managed from one month to the next. Institutions function, but collective will has withdrawn.

Here lies one of the great ruptures of our era: the disappearance of a responsible, honest political class connected to a national project, and the transformation of the Romanian nation into an administered population. A population lives by procedures, but a NATION lives by HISTORICAL MEANING.

The economy confirms this degradation. Taxes rise and take the form of modern tributes. Insolvencies multiply. Jobs disappear. Inflation erodes daily life. Instability reduces any planning horizon to two or three months. Investment retreats. Local capital goes on the defensive, while large capital extracts, optimizes, and leaves.

Romania continues to carry enormous potential: natural resources, geographic position, agricultural capacity, industrial tradition, technical intelligence, and workforce.

A large part of this capital was ceded through privatizations, concessions, and dependencies, while another part was wasted due to the absence of a national strategy. Romania relinquishes all national resources, while the added value that should rightfully belong to us concentrates elsewhere. This is the mechanism through which a rich country becomes a fragile economy.

At the same time, the world is entering a phase of harsh confrontation. The United States, China, Russia, and the European Union are repositioning themselves. The economy becomes a weapon.

Technology becomes power. Supply chains become front lines. The post–Cold War order fractures. In this climate, spaces that live on imports, consumption, and extraction slide toward the periphery. Spaces that produce, innovate, and control value remain actors.

Romania stands on this fault line.

At 44, I look at this world with painful clarity.

My path—from a neighborhood in Iași to a mountain village, from noise to structure, from adaptation to construction—reflects this search for meaning in an era of disintegration.

My life, my family, and the communities I work with carry weight. The pressing question is a historical one: Does a society still have the capacity to build something together in a world that is being reconstructed around us?!?

Where are we heading?

Toward the continuation of degradation, dependence, and the status of territory, or toward the rebuilding of a nation that produces, thinks, and defends its interests?

The answer of this era lies in how Romania regains control over production, resources, and value chains.

This is where the Model of Performing Regions emerges.

Regions—Moldova, Banat, Transylvania, Oltenia, Muntenia, Crișana, Dobrogea, Maramureș—become the real units of economic power. Each builds its competitive specialization: industry, agro-industry, bioeconomy, technology, logistics, health tourism.

Capital, labor, and know-how gather where there is a project, infrastructure, and stability.

The region becomes the platform that negotiates with global capital: resources, people, and markets are transformed into bargaining power. Value remains within the territory. The state assumes the role of strategic architect that coordinates, protects, and directs these regional engines.

In this context, starting in 2025, #PartidulRegiunilor has begun to take shape as the political expression of this architecture.

It aims to provide a legal and institutional form to the model of performing regions, transforming it into public policies, regional governance, and national strategy.

This is the direction of real reconstruction:

• recapturing value, rebuilding production, and bringing communities together within a project of economic and national power.

Here lies Romania’s stake.

And here lies my stake.