Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
One of ALDE’S leaders (the party joining the ruling coalition with the Social Democrat Party) made extremely controversial statements against the mass protests held in Bucharest and other big cities to slam the Government’s intention to decriminalize the conflict of interests and to table an emergency ordinance on pardon and amnesty.
ALDE vice-president Catalin Beciu on Thursday posted on Facebook harsh accusations against the protesters, saying the protests in Bucharest would be “a Nazi-like demonstrations attended by some morons and animals who give him the pip.”
“Yesterday (e.n.Wednesday) the first Nazi manifestation in the last 70 years took place in Romania. Some morons who want torture instead of confinement and extermination camps instead of prisons took to the streets. They also want the Constitution inobservance, as it guarantees the right to dignity and human treatment. Animals, I am sickened of you. Of all those who took to the streets last night. So sickened that I would also took to the streets against you. Only that I want to be sure I can observe the Constitution that is guaranteeing you the right ot life…Today, I am not sure. I am boiling when I see Nazis. A lot. Down with Kovesi, Iohannis (…) and generally with all morons and Nazis! Later edit: I know, this is not a political language. So what? I am a businessman,” Beciu posted on Facebook.
Later on, he came back with the same incriminatory language, claiming that Romania has extermination camps not prisons and that “Romania is torturing convicts”, and that “we have an abusive judiciary system” and “in prisons we also have innocent, abused people, for whom amnesty is the last hope”. “Those who are cursing me on Facebook should shut up, because I proved I was right, in all that I had stated in the past years, while they had always failed,” he further said.
On Friday, the ALDE leader told Mediafax that his post was “a parallel related to Nazism” and he wanted to say that practices are alike.
“I didn’t have a dictionary of the political doctrines in my hand to make an assessment. I was on Facebook, where people are posting sometimes when they drive, or while eating…. When people are shouting in the street that large groups of persons, guilty or not, should go to prison is that OK? I will always retort to that. I got it, maybe the language is not the most fortunate all the time (…) Those people offended me and I replied to them in the best possible private circumstances (…) I still consider Facebook as a private space. I am considered a politician, but I cannot accept the accusations, as long as I have had a company for 26 years, I have never stolen in my life, never given bribe or taken bribe, and those people told us we have to go to jail in the lump,” he argued, adding that he has received numerous threats, including his girl has been threatened with death.
Narcis Catalin Beciu was secretary of state in the Energy, SMEs Ministry in Ponta Government. He is from Ploiesti, was ousted from PDL in 2008 and would be a close person to ALDE co-chair Calin Popescu Tariceanu.
However ALDE leader Gratiela Gavrilescu announced on Friday that vice-president Catalin Beciu “talked as a private person”, as citizen, not on behalf of the party.
“Mr. Beciu talked as a private person. He even self-suspended himself from the position of ALDE vice-president. I consider he could have had a moment of unrest,” said Gavrilescu, who is also vice-president.
Over 3,000 people have protested against pardon and criminal codes’ amendments in Bucharest since Wednesday. The meetings were also held in Brasov, Cluj Napoca, Iasi, Sibiu, Timisoara and Craiova and were also staged on Thursday night, with another ones being scheduled for Sunday.
- Advertisement -