November 27, 2014 UPDATE
A roundup of domestic and international news
Valentin Țigău, 27.11.2014, 19:42
The leaders of the Social Democratic Party in power in Romania Thursday night decided to convene a National Council and Congress in the spring of 2015. After analysing the results of the presidential elections held recently, when the Social Democratic leader Victor Ponta lost the runoff to the Liberal Klaus Iohannis, the party leaders decided that the Social Democrats must remain in power and come up with a new political project for the country before the legislative elections of 2016. They also voted to expel three high-profile members of the party, Mircea Geoana, Marian Vanghelie and Dan Sova, accused of breaching the party unity principle.
The Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania will leave the ruling coalition, according to a decision made on Thursday in Cluj-Napoca, by the party’s Standing Council. The ethnic Hungarian party has two minister seats in the Ponta cabinet. A final decision will be made by the Council of Representatives, which is to convene on December the 13th. The president of the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Hunor Kelemen, said the decision reflects the fact that in the second round of the presidential elections, 80% of the ethnic Hungarians voted for the winner, the Liberal Klaus Iohannis.
The price of natural gas in Romania will not be changed as of January the 1st, according to the minister delegate for energy, Razvan Nicolescu. The Government of Romania has recently got the written approval of the European Commission to postpone the deadline for deregulating the natural gas market. The prices of the natural gas used for producing thermal power supplied to households will thus be liberalised by 2021, instead of 2018, as originally scheduled. Minister Razvan Nicolescu added that the current gas market deregulation rate in Romania is 50%.
The European Parliament maintains its confidence in Jean-Claude Juncker’s Commission, which Thursday survived a no-confidence vote tabled by far-right and anti-EU parties. The MEPs also passed a resolution aimed at preventing online companies like Google from abusing their position in the market, and demanded the enforcement of the EU legislation.
The Chisinau Court of Appeals Thursday decided that the party “Motherland” should be excluded from the election, after the Chisinau General Police Inspectorate announced the party had used funds from foreign entities in its election campaign, which is against the Moldovan law. The party leaders denied the accusations as frame-up. According to the latest opinion polls, the party was likely to get 8.7% of the votes in Sunday’s elections, which will decide whether or not the former Soviet republic will carry on its European accession efforts. Prior to Sunday’s elections, the pro-European parties in Moldova are expected to win some 39 % of the votes, and the communists just under 20%.
The Ukrainian Parliament approved the appointment of Arseniy Yatsenyuk as head of government. Voting for him were 138 Deputies from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc, 83 from the National Front, one from the Opposition bloc, 32 from Samopomici Party, 21 from the Radical Party, 19 from the Volia Naroda group, 18 from Batkivshchina Party and 16 from the Economic Development group. After the elections, Yatsenyuk said he was ready to support the political reform policies of the president of Ukraine.
