Economic Challenges For European Defence

The public perception in Romania regarding the Syrian refugees has dramatically changed within a few months in the sense of rejecting the idea of receiving immigrants on Romanian territory. In August 2015 the polls indicated that Romanians were in favour of accepting the immigrants, while in September 2015 more than half of the respondents declared they were against receiving refugees. What kind of narrative was used by the Romanian politicians to cover the “refugee/migrant crisis”? This study tried to establish the ways in which social media have been changing Romanian perception related to refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. In this research, we have monitored discourses of xenophobia and poisonings that occurred in the Romanian social media. A few Romanian politicians have aggravated the immigrant related debate via their personal social media accounts. The former Romanian President, Traian Băsescu, was one of them. As the EU public debates on whether the refugees’ quotas should be mandatory or volunteer have scaled up, the people's perception was altered immediately after the discourse about rejecting the refugees has intensified in the online environment.