Ex-PM Nicolae Ciuca resigned from the Senate

Former Prime Minister and ex-PNL President Nicolae Ciuca announced his resignation from the Romanian Senate on Wednesday.

“The time has come to publicly announce my decision to resign from the position of Senator in the Romanian Parliament. Out of respect for my liberal colleagues, it is a decision that I previously communicated to the PNL leadership. I would like this gesture to be interpreted as a natural one, considering that I reached this position thanks to the support of the National Liberal Party,” said Nicolae Ciucă, in a message published on Facebook.

Nicolae Ciucă was also President of the Romanian Senate from 2023 to 2024. “I remain a convinced liberal, firmly placed in the center-right zone. I will always support private initiative, democracy and family, with honesty and decency, even if not in the spotlight, but as a simple member of the PNL. I want to thank everyone who supported me in these years, everyone I worked with and everyone who trusted me! I remain deeply indebted to you!”, said Ciucă.

The decision comes more than two months after Ciucă obtained less than 9% of the vote in the presidential elections, ranking behind Călin Georgescu, Elena Lasconi, Marcel Ciolacu and George Simion.

Subsequently, the website Snoop revealed how Ciucă’s PNL paid for a campaign that massively promoted Călin Georgescu on TikTok. The same website recently revealed, with official data from the new PNL leadership, that the liberals paid 24,000 euros for the 3,000 copies of the volume “In the Service of the Country”, which is in addition to the 2.5 million euros paid to promote it on billboards across the country.

Nicolae Ciucă was the Prime Minister of Romania (2021-2023) and Minister of Defense (2019-2020). He is also a retired general and was Chief of the Defense Staff from 2015 to 2019. He was a senator in the Romanian Parliament, serving his second term.

Last year, as the president of the PNL, Ciucă achieved the worst result in the history of the liberals in the presidential elections on November 24. The PNL leader finished in 5th place in that first presidential election, annulled in the meantime by the Constitutional Court of Romania, and received fewer votes than the former liberal leader Radu Câmpeanu in the “Blind Sunday” of May 20, 1990. He obtained 8.78%, or 811,952 of the votes cast, after counting all the minutes.