Stelian Tănase

In 2006, he was chosen member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania by its president, Vladimir Tismăneanu. The Commission was founded by President Traian Băsescu in order to provide for an official and academic basis for condemning the Romanian communist regime. This took place on December 18, 2006, when the President presented the Commission's 660 pages report to Parliament, making Romania the first Eastern Bloc country to officially condemn its communist regime.

Tănase is also vocal in the campaign to declassify all files kept in Securitate archives; in March 2002, he invited on his talk show a discussion his best friend, after it was revealed that the latter had been a Securitate informant who regularly furnished information on Tănase himself.

In 1996, he was granted a Ph.D. in political sociology by the University of Bucharest. A visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles Sociology Department in 1997, he currently teaches at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Political Sciences.

Tănase was the recipient of several fellowships: he was Visiting Short-Term Fellow (1993) and Visiting Scholar (1994) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, granted a Visiting Short Term Collaborative research project at the University of California, Los Angeles (with Gail Kligman in 1996); a Fulbright scholar, post-Ph.D. grant, The New School for Social Research (1997); Visiting Short Term Scholar at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (1998).

After July 1991, Tănase sided with the group inside the Civic Alliance that called for the organization's transformation into a political party. As a member of the newly created Civic Alliance Party inside the opposition alliance (the Romanian Democratic Convention), he was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for the 1992–1996 legislature, representing the city of Bucharest. He was vice-president of the Parliamentary Committee for Foreign Affairs (until April 1995) and member of the Special Committee for the Advancing a Legislative Proposal Regarding the Functioning of Political Parties.

Stelian Tănase founded 22 magazine in January 1990 and was its first editor-in-chief. A founding member of both the Group for Social Dialogue and the Civic Alliance, Stelian Tănase was the latter's vice-president between 1991 and 1993. In 1992, he founded Sfera Politicii; he is a managing editor of both, as well as a regular contributor to various Romanian newspapers. Over the years, he was the host of several talk shows (2 plus 1 and Orient express for Antena 1; Maşina de tocat for TVR 1; Zece şi un sfert, Zece fix, Tănase şi Dinescu, and 3 X 3 for Realitatea TV).

Tănase became a public figure soon after the Romanian Revolution of 1989: in 1990, he was one of the main organizers of Piata Universitatii marathon protest, Golaniada, the protest movement against former members of the Romanian Communist Party who had gained power during the Revolution.

Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the local university's Faculty of Philosophy in 1977. Before 1989, two out of his first three books were banned by the Communist regime censorship apparatus.

Stelian Tănase (born February 17, 1952) is a Romanian writer, journalist, political analyst, and talk show host. Tănase was from November 2013 to October 2015 the president of TVR. Having briefly engaged in politics during the early 1990s, after the fall of the Communist regime, he has remained a leading figure of the Romanian civil society.