After ruling Social Democrat Party had built a wall around chairman Liviu Dragnea following his prison sentence and Dragnea himself had announced he would not step down and he and the party would get more radical from now on, President Klaus Iohannis retorted that the PSD chair should “just disappear from Romania’s public life after his second conviction”.
He also added that ‘what is more serious is that PSD doesn’t realize that it should send Dragnea home.’
“I have voiced my opinion far too many times about these issues (…) I still believe he should withdraw from politics for good. Therefore, Dragnea, after his second conviction, should just disappear from Romania’s public life. This is what would happen in any country in the world, even in one with an early democracy. Ok, that Dragnea won’t withdraw, he won’t withdraw. This is how he thinks. However, a fact which is even more serious is that the PSD doesn’t realize that they must send Dragnea home, that, in fact, we are now in a completely inappropriate and unfortunate stage when an entire party and the largest party in Romania is turning into a pressure group or a lobby group for an offender,” Iohannis said.
The head of state also referred to the possibility that the ruling coalition might pass the criminal codes by emergency ordinance, after the Social Democrats’ Executive Committee had announced on Friday that the Parliament’s pace is too slow and that the amendment of the criminal codes must be hastened.
Iohannis said that “we should cut it out with the emergency ordinances”, adding the civil society must be on alert and to firmly protest if an emergency ordinance that should not exist, like the GEO 13 in 2017, appears.