Romanian president nominates technocrat as new PM
If approved by parliament, ex-EU agriculture commissioner Dacian Ciolos will run the country until elections next year.
Romanian President Klaus Iohannis has nominated former European Commissioner Dacian Ciolos as the country’s new prime minister, after mass protests over a deadly nightclub fire brought down the government last week.
Iohannis said on Tuesday that Romania needed “a clean person” who was not involved in scandals.
“I see a government of technocrats as the solution for now,” the president told reporters. “Political parties agree with this idea. I’m convinced this is the right path for a year [until a parliament election]”.
Under the constitution, Ciolos, who was EU agriculture commissioner from 2010 to 2014, has 10 days to draft a programme, come up with a team of ministers and ask parliament for a vote of confidence.
If approved by parliament, he will then put together a government and remain in office until elections due in the autumn of 2016.
“I will concentrate my attention and energy on forming a team,” Ciolos, who also served as Romania’s agriculture minister from 2007 to 2008, told reports at the Cotroceni presidential palace.
“We’ve been through a key period for our society. Romanian society has reached that degree of maturity that requires a public presence by a government, so that it acts like a bridge between various state institutions.”
Analysts expect that a cabinet of technocrats, with a term ending in late 2016, will easily garner enough parliamentary support.
“He [Ciolos] will likely try to select independent candidates to head individual portfolios,” Otilia Dhand, an analyst at Teneo Intelligence, a New York-based political risk consultancy, told the Reuters news agency.
“His government will not make any significant changes in current policies. It will be a cabinet of ‘status quo maintenance’.”
Related: Public discontent swells in Romania
Former Prime Minister Victor Ponta quit on November 4 after tens of thousands, mostly young people, staged days of protests calling for an end to corruption and for better governance, following a fire in a Bucharest nightclub last month that killed at least 48 people.
The government is currently headed by interim Prime Minister Sorin Campeanu, the former education minister.