To the right, to the right: PNL and PDL agree to single presidential candidate, merger

PNL and PDL will have a single candidate for the presidential elections this fall, Vasile Blaga (PDL leader) and Crin Antonescu (PNL leader, currently on his way out) announced after the first series of talks held on Wednesday.

The liberals’ leader, Crin Antonescu(photo), said the two parties will soon agree on the name of the candidate they will support together for the presidential elections, but pointed out the fusion may not take place too soon.

“There are fusions by absorption in which a small party joins a larger party and some more complicated when the parties are equally sized and then that takes a longer time” Antonescu said, quoted by balkaneu.com.

Vasile Blaga said the merger is possible by the parliamentary elections in 2016.

“It is possible to have such a merger, if the analyses show that together we get more than separately. (…) If we began talks about a merger today, we would deal with the merger only, and there is no time for that. Let us see at least the [November] presidential elections over, and then we can begin talks on this matter too”, Blaga said, quoted by Agerpres.

Read more about

Altexpress integrated Logystec, after merger effective March 2024

read more

The Democratic Liberal head spoke of the proposals his party will put forward in the discussions with the Liberals.

“I think we’ll very fast agree on the economic offer, which is important even in the presidential debate. I think we’ll have no problems for both our parties to back the European and Euro-Atlantic track of Romania. I think we’ll have no problem in supporting the rule of law state, a minimal yet powerful state, and backing the setupof the conditions for the creation of jobs — namely cutting the tax pressure on the employers. We have separate projects, but ones that have been tabled to Parliament by both our parties. (…) We will ultimately build the team to put such things into practice”, the PDL chairman underscored.

By the end of June, PNL members will reunite in an extraordinary congress to select a new president for the party, which could possibly be Klaus Iohannis, mayor of Sibiu, who earlier this week announced he was going to be a candidate for the leadership position.

The leader of Romania’s largest opposition party in parliament, Crin Antonescu, resigned on May 26, one day after his National-Liberals fell short of its target in the European Parliament elections.

Antonescu had said during the campaign that he would step down if the party won less than 20 per cent of the votes in the May 25 elections. The National-Liberals won 15 per cent, according to the electoral commission, with 99.9 per cent of the ballots counted.