Back to the “Future”: USR and the “New People” in Politics (2020–2024)

What are the limits of political attempts to “imagine the future” and create new collective identities in stabilizing political imaginaries? Movement parties have styled themselves as champions of neglected, demobilized segments of the population. If European movement parties have tended to veer ideologically towards the far-right, Romania has provided some interesting exceptions. The Save Romania Union (Uniunea Salvați România, USR) is a center-right movement party founded in 2016 closely associated with the 2017 mass protests. USR has campaigned on an anti-corruption and pro-justice platform, promoting “new people” in politics and supporting the deepening of “democracy,” structural “change” through democratic “reforms” as well as upholding the “rule of law.” In this article I analyze the discursive consistency and social as well as historic context of this new collective identity—”new people”—by looking at its mutations between 2020 and 2024. I argue that the heterogeneous political demands subsumed under this label resulted in ideological overreach, hollowing out USR’s reformist message, favoring a performative interpretation of identity, and eventually undermining attempts at instituting an alternative political imaginary.