From Colectiv to Rahova: How privatisation fractured Romania’s social solidarity

Author: Maria Luisa Guevara

Ten years and two tragedies apart, Romania has been offered a stark mirror of its own evolution. In 2015, the Colectiv fire sparked a national uprising, channeling middle-class fury against corruption into streets and squares. In 2025, the Rahova gas explosion elicited a different, more divided response: a flurry of classist victim-blaming. The distance between these two reactions measures a profound shift in the country’s social and political landscape, revealing a new and insidious enemy — a system fractured by privatisation and a society learning the wrong lessons.

Colectiv, the tragedy that shook the nation 

It’s been 10 years since the tragedy at the Colectiv club in Romania, where a fire started during a concert on October 30th 2015. 64 people died (26 immediately), 185 were injured of which 146 were hospitalised.

The fire started from fireworks being launched inside the club during the concert, while the wall insulation was not fireproof. The public health infrastructure was not equipped to handle such a large number of burnt victims — emergency hospitals in Bucharest were overwhelmed, as were the ambulances. 35 victims were sent abroad for treatment. This was the worst tragedy after 1989 in terms of deaths, and it spurred a large number of protests against corruption. 

It turns out the club was functioning without the fire department authorisations and exit issues were blocked, leaving the victims trapped in the fire — many of them died intoxicated with the fumes. Accusations of corruption hit the club owners as well as civil servants at the fire departments who verified the place but did not prevent it from opening, as well as Cristian Popescu Piedone, the mayor of the 4th district of Bucharest where the club was located. It is to be noted, that no district local authorities were asking for a fire department authorisation for clubs to function — it was simply not in the law. 

The mayor was eventually sentenced to 4 years in prison back in 2022 but managed to get out of prison a year and some months later. 

A political earthquake and a broken promise

But beyond the context, what is important to understand is that the Colectiv tragedy changed the face of Romanian politics forever. Dozens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest their anger against the corruption that was to be blamed for this tragedy.

What changed is not just a revival of protesting as a means to express discontent, but the very essence of their demands. The slogan “Corruption Kills” was born in that context and was used also in the following years of protests regarding the justice system in Romania. 

While the 2010-2011 anti-austerity protests were about demanding better material conditions, and were attended by the working class mainly, this time, protests were mostly led by middle-class, young Romanians who — beyond the immediate rage caused by the tragedy — voiced their desire to be part of a more Europeanised country, one that doesn’t rely on the so-called Ottoman-inherited practices of corruption and sinecures. Importantly, there were protests even in the diaspora, with hundreds or thousands of Romanian émigrés protesting in front of their embassies in Paris, London, Rome or New York. 

Interestingly, the then-president of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, started discussions with the “civil society” — a term that loosely encompasses NGO activists such as the current president Nicuşor Dan but also from think tanks such as Expert Forum or Freedom House. He also demoted the PM, Victor Ponta, and replaced him with Dacian Ciolos, and tasked him with forming a “technocratic” government. Meritocracy was going to be the main way to get into the government — at least that’s what was promised.

In this past decade, Romania has been governed by Klaus Iohannis and has seen a number of PMs come and go. Back in 2015, Romanians were promised that a new hospital dedicated to burnt victims was going to be built — 10 years later still no hospital in sight. 

Rahova, a different kind of disaster

But another tragedy was going to happen, almost 10 years later to the day: a gas explosion happened on October 17th 2025 in a residential block in a working-class neighbourhood of Bucharest, Rahova, situated in the 5th district. 

A day before, the locals called the gas company Distrigaz to report on a gas leak. The company came in and closed the gas valve and put a seal on it but did nothing to inspect where it came from. The next day, at around 9 am the explosion happened. 

The response from public authorities was relatively swift, with victims being hospitalised and the perimeter secured. A special investigative team with forensic police as well as INSEMEX specialists (National Institute for Mining Security and Anti-explosive Protection) was tasked with finding what happened.

Distrigaz claimed that the seal on the valve was broken. The findings from the INSEMEX specialists is that a gas pipeline under the road in front of the building cracked, following an electrical discharge from the electric cables that were buried very close to the pipeline. This started to raise questions about the reliability of utility works in Bucharest. Shortly after the explosions, allegations against the mayor of another district (3rd) started to appear: a number of new residential buildings have been built through companies with ties to him, and roads were built directly upon gas pipelines without any security measures being taken. In other words, Bucharest is currently a powder keg, awaiting the next explosion to happen. Moreover, other explosion incidents in residential buildings started to show up in the media.

The blame game: from corruption to classism

Interestingly, the response to this tragedy was completely different from the one for Colectiv — and not just because the number of victims was lower (3 deaths, among which a pregnant woman and 14 wounded). It seems that there is a deeper cause for this.

Compared to the Colectiv tragedy, the response on social media has been — with a few exceptions from left-wing pundits — to blame the victims. A flurry of classist comments flooded Facebook groups and posts, about a “Dorel” (the negative cliché of a working class Romanian handyman with no qualifications in a particular field) who may have removed the seal and opened the gas valve because “he couldn’t wait to get his hot coffee in the morning”. This victim blaming continued for days after the incident, but the Rahova locals responded back. 

The people who lived in the affected block, as well as ordinary citizens from Bucharest started to testify on social media about how poorly the gas leaks are handled. The procedure is verging on the absurd: when someone calls Distrigaz to report a leak, Distrigaz employees come to turn off the gas and put a seal on it, and then the locals need to call a private firm to come do the repairs. Often, these firms demand unbelievably high fees (1,500-2,000 RON, meaning 300-400 euros) to turn back on the valve, but they don’t investigate where the leak is coming from and don’t often do any repairs. 

This time, no one accused the local authorities of corruption — even though the 5th district where the explosion happened is led by none other than the son of Piedone, Piedone Jr. Interestingly, corruption is no longer to be blamed for the tragedy when it hits a working class neighbourhood. And indeed, this time, it doesn’t seem to be a case of corruption. Rather, it seems to be a case of rampant privatisation of public services. 

The real culprit: a public utility fractured by privatisation

Two decades ago, gas supply was a public utility with the whole supply chain being “integrated”, i.e. the same public company handled all the supply chain. But the neoliberal dogma says that public utilities should not only be privatised, but the supply chain must not be fully integrated. Rather, the various parts should be sectioned off: production, transport, distribution, supply to consumers, and marketing. The argument is always the same: increased efficiency, greater competition, and market innovation — although there is no proof that this actually happens. If anything, there is more and more evidence of privatisation of public utilities being detrimental to users as well as public budgets. 

Now, the gas supply in Romania is privatised and the supply chain is broken in several steps: 

• Production: RomGaz and OMV Petrom are among the major companies producing gas in Romania but there are a handful of other players in the market.
• Transport: handled by Transgaz, the only monopoly in the gas market. It is owned by the state (>58%), as well as a public investment fund (>30%), the rest being traded on the Bucharest Stock Market. (Interestingly, three days after the tragedy, Transgaz shares increased in value thanks to its announcement regarding the Neptune Deep project)
• Distribution (the network that brings gas to consumers) is handled by a dozen private companies, among which Distrigaz but also Gazmir, Megaconstruct, Delgaz Grid – each one focusing on various regions in Romania.
• Supply to users: about 55 private firms purchase the gas on the fictitious market and sell it to consumers. Some of the main companies in this area are Enel, or Engie (French capital).

The gas market in Romania is regulated by ANRE, the public authority that hands out authorisations for these private firms to distribute and supply gas, as well as for maintenance firms (where the market is even more fragmented). 

The argument that was used in order to privatise the gas utility network in Romania is that more competition brings about lower prices, better service and increased innovation and investment in infrastructure. None of these have happened so far: since the liberalisation of prices (no longer regulated by ANRE since 2020), these have gone up almost exponentially – 44% higher than in the EU, despite the fact that Romania is a natural gas producer. This is because prices are decided on the “spot market” and the supply companies effectively buy the gas on a fictitious market where prices vary very frequently. Moreover, the gas infrastructure built in the past two decades has been done so that it cannot function without importing (expensive) gas from abroad.

Moreover, in terms of improvement in infrastructure, it is true that the gas network has expanded in Romania in the past decade, but this is due to the fact that many rural areas are being included in the grid — not because any significant investment has been made to ensure the safety of the already-existing pipelines in urban areas. Most of the distribution network has been developed during the communist era, before 1989, thus many pipelines are more than 35 years old — in some areas of Bucharest these can be older than 60 years. 

Interestingly, the few modernisation projects that happen in Romania are financed with public money and operated by the private companies handling the transport and distribution. Thus, the argument that privatising public utilities will be cost-effective for the public budget is null.

Another consequence of privatising utilities is visible every time Romanians call their gas supplier when noticing a gas leak: Distrigaz comes in, shuts down the valve and seals it but the private companies that should handle the maintenance afterwards do not do their job and ask ridiculous amounts of money to owners’ associations just to turn back on the valve without having done anything significant to improve safety.

A nation divided, a cycle unbroken 

Now, going back to the response around the Rahova tragedy, nearly a month after it happened, the investigation seems to have stalled — there are no public explanations as to why the cracks on the gas pipeline under the road in front of the building could have caused gas to accumulate in the 5th floor apartment where the explosion happened. Nor is there any explanation as to why an electric cable was buried close enough to the gas pipeline that a short circuit could have cracked the pipeline. 

Nor do the victims have any clarity about what is going to happen to their homes. State authorities  say that the building needs to be demolished because the damage is irreparable. But the question remains who will build the block and whose ownership will it be: according to the housing law in Romania, if the state builds a residential block, the ownership remains public and cannot be transferred to private persons. 

In parallel, the justice system has placed under preventative arrest a few employees of Distrigaz and the private maintenance firm. The judges claim that the incident could have been avoided had the employees followed the safety procedures. According to the judges, the Distrigas employee who checked the building on the morning of October 16th did not identify the type of defect on the network, did not take safety measures and did not inform his superiors in order to take action. Moreover, the maintenance firm employees who proceeded with the technical inspection of the building on the evening of October 16th and detected gas leaks did not warn the gas distributor (which seems to be Distrigaz, but the documents may also refer to the supplier — due to Romanian language being unclear on the terms distribution and supply (distributie/furnizare), and left the premises before eliminating the gases.

While the judges may have found the immediate culprits, the tragedy in Rahova shows a systemic failure to ensure the safety of residents in Bucharest but also the wider country. And this failure is systemic because when a market is broken into several supply sections, and is privatised, despite all the regulatory supervision by the ANRE, is it much more difficult to control who does what and whose responsibility it is to conduct maintenance and investment. 

A decade may separate Colectiv and Rahova, but they are connected by a persistent thread of systemic failure. The tragedy of Colectiv was met with public outrage that demanded a more European future. The tragedy of Rahova revealed a state hollowed out by privatisation met with public apathy and classist division. The target of blame has shifted to the “Dorel” next door, where empathy is rationed by class. But just as the fire at Colectiv could have happened to any concert-goer, a cracked gas pipeline threatens every resident living in Romanian cities. Until Romanians see the crumbling pipeline beneath the Rahova block as the same threat as the flammable foam on the Colectiv walls — a threat that knows no class — the cycle of tragedy and misplaced blame is doomed to repeat. The real powder keg is not just the gas network beneath our feet, but the complacency of a society that has forgotten how to be outraged on behalf of all its citizens. And with our own President asking the business community to take over from the state and start making the law in the country, more tragedies are bound to happen, because that’s what privatisation of public services does in the long run.

Photo: The building in Rahova after the explosion (source: YouTube)

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