Do we like them?

Do we like Klaus Iohannis?

Our score: 5 out of 10. No harmful words turned up and he urged tolerance in 2016, but years of property losses and an unpaid tax bill, per ANAF, keep him in the middle.

Iohannis ran Romania for a decade and left in February 2025 by resigning, not by finishing his term the usual way. Opposition parties had backed a motion to impeach him, and Reuters reported he quit to pre-empt it. His announcement was blunt: “I am resigning from the position of President of Romania.”

The reaction was cold. The leader of the UDMR party said he left behind frustration and disappointment, USR said the move came very late, and AUR announced plans for a censure motion against the government. Nobody was weeping at the door, and that tells you how his popularity ended up.

The long-running saga is the property. A Sibiu house he and his wife bought in 1999 became a court fight, and in April 2016 a court ruled that the communist-era tenants, not the couple, were the rightful owners. A Pitesti court rejected his bid to annul that in 2017; the couple rejected claims of wrongdoing, and his spokeswoman said he had respected an earlier ruling and agreed to repay the rent.

The latest chapter we found is from January 2026. The Sibiu Tribunal ruled for the Romanian State, through the tax agency ANAF, against the other co-owner of a Sibiu building, which lets ANAF register the whole house. ANAF is also seeking damages from Iohannis for the State's lack of use of the half-share, and it sought a precautionary seizure of family assets, which was appealed. ANAF's president said there were no signs the couple intended to pay, and that report carried no response from Iohannis.

On the harm test, the record we could read is clean but thin. In 2016, as Romania weighed recognising a same-sex marriage between a US citizen and a Romanian man, he said “Tolerance and acceptance of others are vital”. He also said religious fanaticism does not help society. We found no campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, the climate or vaccines in what we opened, though a reader should know we didn't find him fighting for same-sex partnerships either.

So where does that leave us? He passes the harm test with an asterisk, because the evidence is thin rather than glowing. On the good-person test it's a close call, because the pattern is a family that keeps losing property cases, a state still chasing money, and an exit under impeachment pressure. Nothing we opened shows a conviction, and we couldn't open the sources on his awards or charity work, so that side of the ledger is blank here.