Hello, this is Kasmira. Tuesday this week marked International Day of Parliamentarism – and the 137th anniversary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which promotes democracy and provides support to its 183 member parliaments and 15 associate members around the world.
Our Le Temps colleague Stéphane Bussard caught up with Anda Filip, who this week became the first woman to lead the Geneva-based organisation. |
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Anda Filip, the IPU’s new secretary general, photographed at the organisation’s Geneva headquarters on 18 June 2026. (©Panos Pictures for Le Temps/Mark Henley)
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Anda Filip was born in New York in the late 1960s, though she never became a US citizen. The daughter of a Romanian diplomat, she grew up immersed in the diversity of the United Nations International School in Manhattan. In 1982, however, her family returned to Romania at a time when life there was far from easy.
“Everyone used to ask me how I managed the leap from Manhattan to Bucharest. The truth is that my school and university years were very happy ones. I studied philology, English and French at the University of Bucharest,” Filip recalls. “Even though the political system was closed off, people still found ways to escape – through books, performances, the theatre.”
Today, she speaks with pride about being Romanian, noting that from 1958 onwards her country was the only member of the Warsaw Pact without Soviet troops stationed on its soil. She was 22 when the Berlin Wall fell, and has not forgotten that more than 2,000 of her fellow Romanians died for freedom during the 1989 revolution. Yet she is not given to misplaced nostalgia – least of all when discussing the fate of the Romanian autocrat Nicolae Ceaușescu, “who became utterly paranoid after his visit to North Korea”, Filip recalls.
That history has certainly not held back her career. Last April, she was elected secretary general of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) at its assembly held in Istanbul. She began her four-year term on 1 July, becoming the first woman – and the first Eastern European – to lead the organisation, founded on 30 June 1889 and headquartered in Geneva.
Read the full story on Geneva Solutions.
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