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Sibiu, Transylvania

The Germans left Sibiu. It kept electing them.

Every mayor of Sibiu since 2000 has come from the Democratic Forum of Germans in Romania, the party of the country's small German minority. In 2004 its candidate, Klaus Iohannis, who later became Romania's president, was re-elected with 88.7% of the vote.

mariuscomper.uk · 20 October 2026

#How many Germans live in Sibiu?

For most of its recorded history Sibiu, Hermannstadt in German, was a German-speaking town. At the census of 1850, which recorded each person's ethnic nationality, 69% of its residents were German, nearly nine in ten of them recorded as Saxons. The name was a medieval label for privileged settlers from the west, many of whom probably came from the Moselle and Luxembourg region in the 12th and 13th centuries, according to the historian Daniel Ursprung.

The 2021 census recorded fewer than a thousand: 968 Germans among 134,309 residents, or 0.7%. That share is pulled down by the 17% of residents whose ethnicity was not recorded; among those whose ethnicity was, Germans were 0.9%.

Sibiu as 100 houses

Each house is one per cent of the city's residents at that census, rounded to whole houses. Drag through the years, or play them in order.

  • Germans
  • Hungarians
  • Others
  • Romanians
  • Not recorded
Sibiu in 1850 as 100 houses: Germans 68.7%, Hungarians 6.4%, Others 7.0%, Romanians 17.9%

15,315 residents; 10,522 Germans, 68.7% of the city.

  • Germans68.7%
  • Hungarians6.4%
  • Others7.0%
  • Romanians17.9%
  • Not recorded0.0%
Sibiu municipality within today's boundaries. 1850–2002: census figures compiled by Varga E. Árpád; 2011 and 2021: National Institute of Statistics. The censuses of 1880–1910 asked mother tongue; the others asked nationality or ethnicity. In 2011 and 2021 many residents had no ethnicity recorded.

#Where did Sibiu's Germans go?

The German share fell for a century before the Germans themselves left. Every census of nationality from 1930 to 1977 counted between 24,263 and 28,172 Germans in Sibiu, while the city grew to 2.7 times its 1930 size around them. Almost all of the growth was Romanian: the number of Romanians rose from 20,251 to 119,625.

Then, between the censuses of 1977 and 1992, the German population fell from 25,414 to 5,605, by 78%.

The city grew; the Germans stayed level, then left

Residents of Sibiu and German residents at each census, 1850–2021

  • All residents
  • German residents
Residents of Sibiu and German residents at each census, 1850 to 2021060k120k180k1850188019101941197720022021All residentsGerman residents25,4145,605
Hover or tap a census year for its figures. Sources as for the houses above.
25,414Germans in Sibiu at the 1977 census
5,605at the 1992 census
111,150people who moved from Romania to Germany as ethnic Germans or their relatives in 1990 alone

The first blow came at the end of the war. In January 1945 tens of thousands of Romania's ethnic Germans were rounded up and deported for forced labour in the Soviet Union. Estimates collected by János Kristóf Murádin of Sapientia University in Cluj run from 70,000 to nearly 98,000, including 26,000 to 27,000 Transylvanian Saxons. In Sibiu proper, the 1941 census counted 23,574 Germans; a count in 1948, by mother tongue, found 16,359 German speakers. By 1956 the whole municipality counted 24,263 Germans, against 28,172 in 1941.

The second was a trade. From 1968 West Germany paid the government of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's communist leader, for each ethnic German it let emigrate. Under the agreements of 1969–70 the price ran from 1,800 Deutschmarks for a worker without qualifications to 11,000 for a university graduate; the last agreement, in 1988, set a flat 8,950 marks a head plus travel costs. Those figures come from Heinz-Günther Hüsch, the lawyer who negotiated the deals for the West German government, as reported in the Siebenbürgische Zeitung. Germany's Federal Office of Administration recorded 225,867 arrivals from Romania between 1968 and 1989. Ernst Meinhardt, who with Hannelore Baier interviewed Hüsch for a 2013 book, puts the total paid at more than a billion marks.

The third was the open border. Romania cancelled the last agreement on 4 December 1989, less than three weeks before Ceaușescu fell, and 111,150 people arrived in Germany from Romania in 1990 as ethnic Germans or their relatives, more than in the five years 1985–89 combined (78,337).

Arrivals in Germany from Romania, ethnic Germans and their relatives

People per year, 1950–2014

Arrivals in Germany from Romania by year: 242,326 from 1950 to 1989, then 111,150 in 1990 alone040k80k120k19501970199020101990: 111,150
Federal Office of Administration (Bundesverwaltungsamt), resettlers by country of origin. The series covers all Germans from Romania, not only those from Sibiu, and includes their non-German relatives. From 1991 it counts only people allocated to the federal states.

#How did a German party win Sibiu?

In the local elections of June 2000 the German Forum's candidate for mayor of Sibiu was Klaus Iohannis, a physics teacher who had become the county's chief school inspector. He came first in the first round with 33.1% and won the run-off against the Social Democrat Ioan Cindrea with 69.2%.

At the census two years later, Germans were about one resident in 62. In 2004 Iohannis was re-elected in the first round with 88.7%, 73,621 votes, about 29 for every German living in the city, children included. The Forum also took 16 of the 23 seats on the city council, up from second place in 2000.

The German Forum's vote and the German share of the city

Mayoral vote share of the Forum's candidate, and Germans as a share of residents at the latest census before the election

  • Forum candidate's vote
  • German residents
German Forum mayoral vote share in Sibiu against the German share of residents, 2000 to 20240%50%100%69.2%3.3%200088.7%1.6%200483.3%1.6%200877.9%1.1%201257.1%1.1%201643.0%1.1%202039.9%0.7%2024IohannisFodor
Mayoral results from the Code for Romania historical results database, each checked against a press report. The 2000 figure is the run-off; every later election was won in the first round. German shares from the 1992, 2002, 2011 and 2021 censuses.

Iohannis won twice more, with 83.3% in 2008 and 77.9% in 2012. His successor, Astrid Fodor, has won three times since, with a shrinking share of the vote: 57.1% in 2016, 43.0% in 2020 and 39.9% in 2024. On the council the Forum fell from 15 seats in 2012 to 8 of 23 in 2020 and 2024.

Sibiu mayoral elections won by the German Forum
YearWinnerShareVotesGermans (census)
2000 run-offKlaus Iohannis69.2%46,2863.3% (1992)
2004Klaus Iohannis88.7%73,6211.6% (2002)
2008Klaus Iohannis83.3%50,1071.6% (2002)
2012Klaus Iohannis77.9%53,2811.1% (2011)
2016Astrid Fodor57.1%27,9481.1% (2011)
2020Astrid Fodor43.0%20,4251.1% (2011)
2024Astrid Fodor39.9%22,3730.7% (2021)

#Why do Romanians in Sibiu vote for the German Forum?

The Forum's voters are overwhelmingly Romanian; there are not enough Germans to elect anyone. What they were voting for is harder to pin down, and the best evidence is a pair of surveys of Sibiu adults analysed by Dragoș Dragoman in a 2005 paper. No survey asked about the first vote, in 2000.

Reasons given for a vote for the German Forum in Sibiu's 2004 council election

Per cent of 1,207 answers in a July 2004 survey of Sibiu adults

  1. Iohannis's record in office79.0%
  2. Qualities of the Saxons9.2%
  3. Hope of foreign investment4.7%
  4. Distrust of Romanian parties3.2%
  5. Sympathy for the Saxons2.0%
  6. No other candidates0.7%
  7. Other1.2%
Dragoș Dragoman, Studia Politica: Romanian Political Science Review 5(1), 2005, table 13. Labels translated from French.

Dragoman reads the answers as a shift. In 2000, he argues, voters seemed to respond to the qualities they attributed to Germans, order, hard work and honesty; by 2004 what counted most was the record of Iohannis's administration. In his statistical model, contact with Saxons, their favourable image and tolerance, together with age, sex, education and income, explained only 1.4% of the variation in the Forum vote; adding the performance of Iohannis's administration took the share explained above a third.

  • A clean partyThe Forum "is seen as being a party of integrity in contrast to the established parties", and Iohannis won Romanian voters "not least due to the stereotype of the honest and hard-working German".Daniel Ursprung, Euxeinos 19–20, 2015
  • A protest vote"All signs pointed to a protest vote in Hermannstadt/Sibiu around the year 2000." The centre-right had no plan for the city, and the left was seen as "recruited from the old cadres of the Communist Party".Benjamin Józsa, the Forum's full-time director since 2014, in the same issue
  • German money and 2007Józsa also credits German investors, drawn by the German language and German schools, and Sibiu's year as European Capital of Culture in 2007, which it shared with Luxembourg and which, he writes, "provided the greatest impetus".Józsa, 2015; European Commission
  • Philo-Germanism without GermansCristian Cercel argues that Romanian elites' admiration for Germans, seen as "embodiments of expertise, technocracy, entrepreneurial spirit, and management", is bound up with Romania's wish to be European. Iohannis's election as president in 2014 is one of his case studies.Cercel, 2019, as summarised by Tibor Toró in Intersections, 2020

#Who has run Sibiu since Iohannis?

Iohannis won Romania's presidential election in November 2014. Sibiu's council accepted his resignation as mayor on 2 December and chose one of his two deputies, Astrid Fodor, also of the Forum, as acting mayor; he was sworn in as president on 21 December. In the run-off he took 54.4% of the national vote and 81.7% in the city of Sibiu; in 2019 he was re-elected with 66.1% nationally and 85.2% in Sibiu. He resigned with effect from 12 February 2025, after parliament opened an opposition motion to suspend him.

Fodor has kept the mayoralty for the Forum, though not without trouble: in 2019 the prefect, the central government's representative in the county, ended her mandate over a finding that she had held incompatible posts in 2012–14, and a court restored it weeks later. In 2024 she won again with 39.9%. On the 2021 census, Germans were 0.7% of the city she runs.

In 1850 two residents of Sibiu in three were German. In 2021 fewer than one in a hundred were. The party of those who stayed still runs the city.

#Sibiu's census record, 1850 to 2021

Every census since 1850 that counted nationality or mother tongue across the municipality of Sibiu, within its present boundaries. A 1948 count covered only the city proper and is left out. The two highlighted rows bracket the emigration.

Sibiu at every census, 1850–2021
CensusResidentsGermansGerman shareRomaniansHungariansOthersNot recorded
185015,31510,52268.7%2,7379771,079–
1880*22,69916,52372.8%3,8022,089285–
1890*25,13915,68562.4%5,6323,223599–
1900*33,74818,99656.3%8,2185,934600–
1910*38,06120,01552.6%10,1257,297624–
192037,68421,78057.8%9,8674,3281,709–
193055,22425,67846.5%20,2516,6142,681–
194170,35228,17240.0%35,7534,3132,114–
195690,53424,26326.8%59,9024,8841,485–
1966109,65825,04722.8%78,6465,206759–
1977151,13725,41416.8%119,6255,114984–
1992169,6565,6053.3%158,9084,164979–
2002154,8922,5081.6%148,2693,135980–
2011147,2451,5611.1%130,9982,1691,00411,513
2021134,3099680.7%108,8581,20655422,723

* Counted by mother tongue; other years by nationality or ethnicity. 1850: Germans include 9,227 people recorded as Saxons. 1880: Varga's corrected series, which spreads infants who could not yet speak across the language groups. Others: Roma, Jews where counted as a nationality, Czechs, Poles and smaller groups.

#Sources and method

Census figures for 1850–2002 come from Varga E. Árpád's compilation of every census for each settlement of Sibiu county, which reports the municipality within its present boundaries. The 2011 and 2021 figures come from the National Institute of Statistics. The 1880–1910 censuses were Hungarian and asked mother tongue; the others asked nationality or ethnicity, so the series is not perfectly comparable. "Not recorded" is people for whom the 2011 and 2021 censuses have no ethnicity. The houses, chart shares, the 1977–92 fall, the "one in N" figures and the votes per German resident (the Forum's 2004 votes divided by the 2002 German count) are calculated from those tables. Election results are from the Code for Romania historical results database, cross-checked against the press reports listed below; the official electoral authority's archive could not be reached.