Marian Munteanu is a former leader of the anti-government protests that took place in 1990 in Romania and were ended violently by the intervention of the miners. During the early 1990s he was also the leader of the far-rightpolitical organization "Mişcarea pentru România". Munteanu was the leader of the Students' League, which was one of organizers of the protests against Ion Iliescu's rule. On June 14, 1990, he was severely beaten. A miner was later imprisoned for attempted murder following witnesses' declarations that he had tried to kill Munteanu using an axe. He was arrested and detained at Jilava between June 18 and August 2, 1990. As a leader of "Mișcarea pentru România", he wrote several articles expressing his admiration for the Iron Guard, a local fascist movement active before World War II. Consequently, he has been condemned for antisemitic discourse by various public figures, notably literary criticNicolae Manolescu. In 2000, Munteanu was presented as a presidential candidate by the party led by Virgil Măgureanu, former Securitate officer and first head of the Romanian Intelligence Service, though he eventually withdrew from the race. As of 2011, he was teaching ethnology, anthropology and folklore at the University of Bucharest. Munteanu made a comeback into politics in 2016 after accepting National Liberal Party's proposal as candidate for mayor of Bucharest for that year's local elections. The proposal was regarded as controversial at best, coming after the previous candidate, Ludovic Orban, was withdrawn as a result of his prosecution for corruption by the National Anticorruption Directorate. Soon after, documents surfaced on the Internet indicating Munteanu as a former collaborator of the Securitate, Nicolae Ceaușescu's secret police, having signed an agreement for furnishing information and being paid for. He was approached by the secret police after he became a confidante of Petre Țuțea, with the purpose of keeping under surveillance the former anticommunist. Munteanu refused to sign an official proof of integrity document, as required to candidates for public positions. Several organizations and even the National Liberal Party have filed official requests with the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, to check the ties he might have had with the Securitate before 1989. Following public outcry, the National Liberals decided to drop him as party candidate. Later in 2016 Munteanu created a new political movement in order to run in the elections for the Parliament.
