Romania’s new president takes aim at graft
Print Edition
ROMANIA’S president-elect Klaus Iohannis urged parliament yesterday to scrap a corruption amnesty bill, moving swiftly to make good on a campaign promise and allay EU fears over graft in the country.
Iohannis will be sworn in as president in December after he inflicted a surprise defeat on Prime Minister Victor Ponta in polls on Sunday, a result that will maintain a potentially destabilizing split between the country’s executive powers.
An ethnic German mayor whose campaign was backed by two center-right parties, Iohannis turned round a 10-point deficit to win the runoff comfortably, as widespread anger at voting problems overseas appeared to galvanize the anti-Ponta camp.
“I will prove Romania is a serious, credible and long-term partner,” Iohannis told reporters.
Analysts had said a victory for Ponta might have helped make Romania more stable, with the main levers of power held by one bloc. By contrast, although he distances himself from the outgoing president’s combative style, Iohannis’s win may trigger renewed political tensions in one of Europe’s poorest states.
“The relationship between Social Democrat PM Ponta and center-right president-elect Klaus Iohannis will likely be strained,” said Otilia Dhand at Teneo Intelligence.
“In the near term, the political situation could be volatile, but in the longer term, a president from a different part of the political spectrum than the government ... could foster the fragile independence of the judicial system,” bank UniCredit said yesterday.
The country of 20 million is emerging from painful budget cuts imposed during the global slowdown. Growth rebounded to more than 3 percent in the third quarter of 2014, but corruption and tax evasion are rife, and progress to implement reforms and overhaul a bloated state sector is mixed.
Prime minister since 2012, the 42-year-old Ponta often feuded with his rival, outgoing President Traian Basescu, which stymied policymaking and caused a constitutional crisis. The 55-year-old Iohannis had promised during the campaign to safeguard the independence of Romania’s judicial system and the fragile progress made in tackling corruption.
The European Union has raised concerns about a failure to tackle rampant high-level graft in Romania and Bulgaria, its two poorest members. Both have been kept outside the passport-free Schengen Zone since entering the EU in 2007.
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