László Tőkés
Pastor in Timișoara, Romania, whose threatened eviction in December 1989 set off the protests there that spread to Bucharest. He later sat in the European Parliament.
László Tőkés was born at Cluj on 1 April 1952, according to the European Parliament’s register of its members (European Parliament, Members’ directory, entry for László Tőkés). The parliament’s chronology of 1989 says that protests broke out in Timișoara on 16 December in response to the government’s attempt to evict him, a dissident pastor, and that they spread to Bucharest and forced Nicolae Ceaușescu to flee (European Parliament, 1989: The Year of Revolutions (2009), entry for 16 December). See Churches and the Fall of Communism.
In the parliament’s eighth term, from 2014 to 2019, he sat for a Hungarian party and was vice-chair of the subcommittee on human rights (European Parliament, Members’ directory, entry for László Tőkés). No document of December 1989 on the events at Timișoara was found on an open institutional site, and this entry says no more about them than the chronology does.
In the timeline
- 9 October 1989, firm dateChurches and the Fall of Communism
On 9 October 1989, after peace prayers in four Leipzig churches, tens of thousands march round the city and the East German state does not use force. A bishop, church groups and party officials had all appealed for calm that day.