Nation profile
Szeklerland
Székelyföld
General information
Presentation
Szeklerland lies in the south-eastern area of Transylvania (Romania), receiving its name from the Szeklers, or Székelys, a people of Hungarian language and identity having settled the territory since the Early Middle Age. Its territory covers the current Harghita and Covasna counties and the central region of the Mures county. Szeklers make up some 75% of the population of Szeklerland. The remaining 25% consists of Romanians, Roma and a tiny minority of Germans.
Of the whole Hungarian population of Transylvania, Szeklers account for approximately 40%. The rest of Transylvanian Hungarians are concentrated in the north-western part of Transylvania (Partium) or scattered throughout the rest of the region.
History
The Szkeler territory had enjoyed autonomy within the Kingdom of Hungary since the medieval period until 1876. Szeklerland, just like the rest of Transylvania, went under Romanian control in 1920, and it was granted nominal autonomy between 1952 and 1968 under the name of Magiar Autonomous Region within communist Romania.
Since the end of communism, Transylvanian Hungarians as a whole and Szeklers in particular have striven for more linguistic and cultural rights and territorial autonomy. The rise of the Szekler autonomy movement, since the first decade of the 21st century, must be understood within that frame. The Romanian government has systematically rejected Szekler autonomy demands, arguing that Romania is a unitary state.
Parties and organizations
The Szekler National Council (Székely Nemzeti Tanács, SZNT) is a Szekler civil society organization, established in 2003, which demands the exercise of the right to self-determination of the Szekler people within Romania via a territorial autonomy agreement. The Hungarian National Council of Transylvania (Erdélyi Magyar Nemzeti Tanács, EMNT/CNMT), also founded in 2003, seeks to represent the whole of the Transylvanian Hungarians, and demands autonomy for them. Both organisations coordinate.
Political parties that receive most Szekler votes are the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania (Romániai Magyar Demokrata Szövetség, RMDSZ/UDMR), the Hungarian Civic Party (MPP/PCM), and the Hungarian People’s Party of Transylvania (EMNP/PPMT). MPP and EMNP started in 2020 a merger process to form a single political organization, the Hungarian Alliance of Transylvania (Erdélyi Magyar Szövetség, EMSZ/AMT).
Among them, UDMR is the oldest (1989) and largest party. All three support autonomy for Szeklerland, although until the first years of the 2010 decade, UDMR was mainly focused on demanding cultural and linguistic rights for Transylvanian Hungarians.
The UDMR-PCM shared pro-autonomy proposal (2014) sought an autonomous region matching the whole territories of the current Mures, Harghita and Covasna counties.PPMT proposed —similarly to SZNT— the establishment of a self-governing region that only included areas having been part of Szeklerland in past times, that is to say excluding the northern and southern areas of Mures, where Hungarians have a less significant presence. This more specific delimitation was used by the UDMR as the bases for the bill introduced to the Romanian Parliament in December 2019 for Szeklerland territorial autonomy. The bill was rejected by the Romanian Senate in April 2020.
(Last updated December 2020.)