Hunor Kelemen

Hunor Kelemen (born 18 October 1967) is a Romanian politician and Hungarian-language writer. The current president of the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), he has been a member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies since 2000, and was nominated as his party's candidate for the 2009, 2014, 2019 and 2024 presidential elections. From December 2009 to May 2012 he was Romania's Minister of Culture in the Emil Boc and Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu governments, a role he has reprised between March and October 2014 in the government headed by Victor Ponta. In 2020, he was re-elected as a member of parliament and became the deputy prime minister of Romania.

In 2000, Hunor Kelemen was awarded the Order of the Star of Romania, Commander rank, and in 2008 Hungary's Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit. In 2012, he married Éva Czézár; the civil ceremony took place at Cârța Town Hall, while the religious wedding was held at St. Michael's Church in Cluj-Napoca.

Biography An ethnic Hungarian, he was born in Cârța, Harghita. He completed primary school in Ineu-Ciuc (the other village of the Cârța commune), and the gymnasium in his native locality, while practising ice hockey in the school's team. After completing high school in Târgu Mureș, he enrolled in the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Cluj-Napoca, graduating as a veterinarian in 1993, and then in the Faculty of Philosophy of the Babeș-Bolyai University, graduating in 1998.

Following the Revolutions of 1989, Hunor Kelemen was one of the founders of the Hungarian language cultural magazines Jelenlét and later became deputy editor in chief. In July, at a summer camp organised by the UDMR at Băile Tușnad, he acknowledged that, as a Hungarian ethnic, he had no chance to win, but he presented the motives that led to his candidature: the desire of the Hungarian community of Romania to have a candidate of its own, the need to fill the traditional Hungarian segment in Romanian politics, and the need to present the message of the Hungarian minority to the Romanian majority. He received 372,764 votes (3.83% of the ballot). He performed better in the regions with important Hungarian communities, winning a majority in the counties of Harghita (71.2%) and Covasna (52.8%), and the second place in Mureș and Satu Mare.

On 20 December 2009, Emil Boc, nominated as prime-minister by the re-elected Traian Băsescu, proposed Hunor Kelemen as the Minister of Culture in the PDL-UDMR coalition government. The proposal was met with strong protests by PDL vice-president Cezar Preda, who declared that his party made the "greatest political mistake of the last years". Following unofficial protests from the Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Religious Affairs, previously subordinated to the Ministry of Culture, were put under the direct control of the prime-minister. Reportedly, the Orthodox Church was dissatisfied with being subordinated to a minister of a different denomination. The cabinet was approved by the Parliament on 23 December 2009.

Kelemen left government in May 2012 when the Răzvan Ungureanu government lost a vote of confidence and was replaced by the one led by Victor Ponta.

Together with Hans Heinrich Hansen, Hunor Kelemen was behind the European Citizens' Initiative called Minority SafePack, which successfully collected more than 1,000,000 signatures in a year starting from 3 April 2017 in order to "improve the protection of persons belonging to national and linguistic minorities and strengthen cultural and linguistic diversity in the European Union".

Electoral history Presidential elections

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