National Liberal Party has a new president

Without an alternative candidate, prime minister Nicolae Ciucă is elected leader of the National Liberal Party.

Ştefan Stoica, 11.04.2022, 13:50

Prime
minister
Nicolae Ciucă is
the new president of the National Liberal Party, in the ruling
coalition. A reserve army general and former chief of staff of the
Romanian army, he only
recently
entered politics and the Liberal Party with the help of president
Klaus Iohannis. His party membership is so new, in fact, that he
needed a special exemption to be able to run for president of the
party.

Ciucă is
replacing Florin Cîţu, who took over the party six months ago and
who was forced to resign because of frictions with the Social
Democrats, also in the ruling coalition, frictions which some feared
may lead to a break-up of the coalition. Ciucă, on the other hand,
also enjoys the support of the Social Democrats and seems to be the
perfect guarantee for peace within the coalition. He promised
stability, recalling that Romania is going through a period of
crisis, from the pandemic to rising costs for energy, food and fuel,
not to mention the humanitarian crisis generated by the war in
Ukraine.

Together
with our partners, the Social Democratic Party and the Democratic
Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, we have undertaken to
implement reforms and modernise the state to benefit citizens, not
for low stakes and sterile arguments. The Romanian people are
expecting results and efficiency from us, not populism and constant
bickering.

His
predecessor Florin Cîţu, who has a background in finance, says the
populism comes from a number of social measures requested by the
Social Democrats and which he
blames
for the high inflation and interest rates we see today. He says
he regrets not taking
a
step back when his party first formed a government with the Social
Democrat, forgetting that he was the one
who
paved the way for this coalition in
the first place when
he caused the departure of the Save Romania Union from the
centre-right coalition that came to power following the 2020
elections.

Political
observers believe the National Liberal Party has lost its autonomy
and
that
its moves are decided elsewhere, proof of which is precisely
the
promotion of inexperienced leaders
like Ciucă and Cîţu, both of whom
came out
of nowhere. With
a domestic and international crisis under way, this debate, is, for
the time being, postponed.

With both
parliamentary and presidential elections in 2024, things will be
heating up. The extremely sensitive subject of Ciucă’s
alleged plagiarism will then most likely resurface. A well-known
investigative journalist who has uncovered many
cases of academic fraud published an article in January in which she
argued that Nicolae Ciucă plagiarised parts of his doctoral thesis
from 2003. He is the third Romanian prime minister involved in a
plagiarism scandal, after the Social Democrats Victor Ponta and Mihai
Tudose. Ciucă denies the accusation of plagiarism and says he will
have the hounour and dignity to make a decision with respect to
resigning as prime minister and party leader when the relevant
authorities publish a conclusion on this subject. (CM)