Conflicts at the top

A compromise between the main coalition partners in Romania over a planned government reshuffle seems unlikely.

Ştefan Stoica, 20.02.2014, 13:15

The Social Liberal Union, the clear winner of the 2012 parliamentary elections, is now on the verge of break-up. The disagreements between its main members, the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party, which became visible last year, have in the past month turned into a deep crisis that is now affecting the government.

For two weeks now, the Liberal leader Crin Antonescu has been unsuccessfully trying to convince the Social Democrat Prime Minister Victor Ponta, whom he now avoids to call either partner or friend, to accept the current mayor of Sibiu, Klaus Johannis, as minister of the interior and deputy prime minister. Analysts say this move would allow Antonescu to keep a close eye on everything the prime minister does, which is exactly why Victor Ponta has denied Johannis access to government.

Ponta’s counterproposal of also creating a position of deputy prime minister for the small Conservative Party, a party co-opted by the Social Democratic Party, alongside the National Union for the Progress of Romania, into a recently created Social Democratic Union, was taken by liberals as an offence. For Crin Antonescu, Ponta’s refusal to accept Klaus Johannis into the cabinet, followed by the prime minister’s taking over the interim office of finance minister and one of his colleagues’ taking over the post of economy minister, two positions which, according to an agreement, belong to the Liberal Party, are nothing but a clear attempt to replace the Social Liberal Government with a Social Democratic one.

The Liberal Party has given the prime minister until Monday to solve the situation or it will pull out all its ministers and ask for the immediate resignation of the government. The prime minister says he is still committed to the alliance with the Liberal Party and that he has no intention of resigning. He added that if the Liberal Party decides to leave the Government, he would appoint interim ministers from among the current cabinet members. Ponta pointed out, however, that he would wait the 45-day legal period for the liberals to return to government.

Though a tireless opponent of both party leaders and of the Social Liberal Union as a whole, Romania’s president Traian Basescu has called on the Union’s two co-presidents to compromise and find a rapid solution to the current crisis. He has warned that the country needs a working government, given the unstable situation in the neighbouring Ukraine.

Supposed to last until 2016, to promote large-scale projects such as the revision of the Constitution, decentralisation or administrative reorganisation, the Social Liberal Union is now facing a premature death.