How one singer exposed Romania's anti-Roma racism

On 12 June 2024, Coldplay played Bucharest. The crowd was ecstatic, right up until it booed a performer off the stage.

Coldplay’s fans are used to the band bringing a local artist on during the set, and the Bucharest show was no exception. The singer they brought out was a 22-year-old going by “Babasha”.

Babasha is a household name in Romania. His single “Păi Naa” sits at the top of the Romanian daily singles chart and has racked up 55 million views on YouTube. And yet, when he walked on stage, he got booed. By his own account, it was because he is Roma.

Manele is a genre bound up with the Roma, with roots in Arabic and Balkan music, and lyrics that run from love at one end to hardship and discrimination at the other. Go to a Romanian wedding and you will hear its bright, upbeat rhythms.

Despite its popularity, or because of it, manele has always been divisive. Critics call it materialistic, oversexualised and low-status, while defenders argue that the criticism it attracts is itself a product of discrimination. In 2010 the Cluj-Napoca city council banned taxi drivers from playing manele, and in 2023 the mayor of Timișoara banned it outright, going as far as cancelling a performance by another Roma artist.

The Roma have been persecuted in Romania for most of the country’s history, through ethnic cleansing, slavery and lynching. Being an ethnically homogeneous country, Romania has never really had a conversation about racism though.

Romania is currently one of the fastest-growing economies in the EU. You would expect prosperity to take the edge off discrimination as it goes. Instead, Romania is also one of the countries with the most racial discrimination cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights.

Roma make up 3.3% of Romania’s population today. They still routinely face hiring discrimination, refusal of treatment by the health system, segregation and police violence. The marginalisation of manele is an extension of that same anti-Roma sentiment.

The good news is that awareness of anti-Roma discrimination is slowly rising, helped along by TikTok and the reach it has given Roma music. And Coldplay, to their credit, did not back down in the face of their own fans. Babasha played a second show with the band in Bucharest, where Chris Martin told the crowd: “If you don’t like it, go to the toilet, or do whatever you want, but be kind.”