Political disputes in Bucharest

A former technocratic prime minister of Romania and a European commissioner for agriculture, Dacian Cioloş resigned as president of the Save Romania Union, four months after being elected. The reason for his resignation is that the party leadership, which is dominated by allies of the former president, Dan Barna, rejected the reform project he initiated. Cioloş says this does not mean he will abandon the party:

"Owing to the lack of support for this plan in the National Bureau, I believe the decent thing to do is tender my resignation. I remain, however, in the party. In order to have a future, and I believe it must have a future, this party needs refreshing, needs to reconnect itself to the society, needs the courage to recognise the limits it must overcome in the near future."

The former transport minister Cătălin Drulă has taken over as interim leader and immediately announced a change of course to a more Liberal political orientation. He called on party members to remain united. With the Social Democratic Party, the National Liberal Party and the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania together in power, thus enjoying a 70% majority in Parliament, the Save Romania Union is in fact the only democratic opposition party in Romania.

The other parliamentary party in opposition, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), increasingly looks like the ideological heir to Romania's far right movement from the inter-war period. On Monday, they were responsible for a worrying incident that occurred in the Chamber of Deputies during debates on a no-confidence motion on the subject of energy bills. The energy minister Virgil Popescu, who was trying to explain why the population has to pay such steep energy bills, was assaulted by the leader of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians George Simion, who grabbed the minister by the neck. This is the first time Parliament is witnessing an incident involving physical violence, despite being no stranger to verbal abuse. The meeting was suspended and when it was resumed the only MPs present were those from the Alliance for the Union of Romanians and the Save Romania Union, who initiated the no-confidence motion. No sanction was taken against Simion, because there are no provisions in this sense in Parliament's regulations. The Liberal leader Florin Cîţu said he would propose clear and tough measures for such incidents.

The Alliance for the Union of Romanians has a busy record, including a violent protest outside Parliament against the mandatory use of the Covid green certificate in the workplace; the forceable entry by its leader George Simion into the Timişoara city hall; and frequent heckling of MPs from other parliamentary parties, including filming them without permission and physically accosting them. Through its leaders, the Alliance of the Union of Romanians has also been aggressively promoting anti-vaccination, ultranationalism and sovereigntism. It was only recently that this party described the Holocaust as a minor theme that does not deserve a special place in the school curriculum, which sparked vehement reactions from the Israeli embassy and the Elie Wiesel National Institute for Studying the Holocaust in Romania.

The violence with which the party is promoting its so-called ideas seems, however, to be to the liking of Romanian voters: from the fourth biggest party in Parliament, it now climbed to number two in opinion polls. (CM)