Ex-PM Ciolos talks about “outdated political class”: PSD has neither the will nor the knowledge to get Romania out of poverty; PNL obstinately refuses to reform itself and is waiting for the PSD to slump naturally. Liberal leaders react. Ciolos’s attack seems odd, does PSD a service, says PNL’s Orban

Ex-Premier Dacian Ciolos talked on Sunday about the old political class which “refuses to see that Romania has changed” and the international context is different. On PSD, Ciolos says that “it has neither the will nor the knowledge to get Romania out of poverty,” because it wants to keep the electorate “in the captivity of poverty.” On PNL, he states that “it obstinately refuses to reform itself and is waiting for the PSD to slump naturally.” On Sunday, ex-Premier Dacian Ciolos posted a message on his Facebook page, talking about the Romanian political class which he considers “old,” which has formed “bizarre and inappropriate alliances in eager rivalry” and refuses to see that Romania has changed. “We have an old political class which, we know, has regularly rotated in power, managing to form bizarre and inappropriate alliances in eager rivalry. The political class I am talking about cannot leave this logic, and these people refuse to see that Romania has changed, that the entire European and international context is different, and they are trying to maintain a deficient manner of engaging in politics. Society’s captivity to their own objectives suits them. Poverty does not bother them. On the contrary, it puts them in an advantage,” Dacian Ciolos wrote on Facebook on Sunday. According to him, the PSD is the leader of this outdated political class, a party that “has neither the will nor the knowledge to get Romania out of poverty.” “The poorer its electoral pool the easier it is for the PSD to give these people a little, drip by drip, keeping them in the captivity of poverty. Unfortunately, I say this with great regret, the PNL finds itself in this area of the old political class and obstinately refuses to reform itself and to join us in a project to profoundly reform Romanian society. A project with an emphasis on well-being. They are waiting for the PSD to slump naturally and for them to take its place. The experience of the CDR in 1996 and the DA Alliance in 2004 has shown that this model does not work,” Ciolos wrote. He said that one can no longer talk about the Ruling Power and the Opposition, but about the old political class and the new political class. “About parties that come from the past and want us in the past and about new parties that want to modernise Romania. With hope and confidence. In what concerns the new political class, it is growing fast and developing in line with society’s future outlook. Maybe not as rapidly as we would like, but we are on the right track. The USR is doing an excellent job at an organisational level and I’m glad to see there is a lot of well-articulated energy. We have a new party on the left too, Demos, from which I expect more, because a new political party must exist on the left side too, with a well-articulated message,” Ciolos added. He claims that the Romania Together Movement is going through “a period of effervescence.” “We are building the party and we are working on the political platform. We have substantiated our principles, we have made all our calculations, and I promise you we will come up with a set of measures that, once implemented, can modernise Romania. If we manage to convince the electorate that we know what we have to do and we are capable of implementing all measures, five years from now Romania will no longer be the same. You will no longer recognise the deplorable state of today. We are decided to offer this country the fate it deserves, to profoundly restructure the state and the economy with a complete emphasis on eradicating poverty and raising entrepreneurship. We are working under enormous stress. Not the stress of winning the elections, but the stress that follows it, when we want to bring to Romanian society a complete change for the best,” Ciolos concludes his message.   PNL’s Turcan reacts: Ciolos’ strongest contribution to Opposition’s action, have documents of promised party released   The strongest contribution that the founding president of the Romania Together Movement, Dacian Ciolos might have to the Opposition’s action, would be to have the promised party’s documents released and to stop attacking the other political formations that have daily at the forefront of the anti-Dragnea  fight, leader of the Liberal deputies Raluca Turcan said on Sunday. “The strongest contribution Mr. Ciolos might have to the Opposition’s action would be to have, once and for all, the documents of the much-promised party released and stop attacking the other parties that have been every day, not sparingly or between two flights, at the forefront of the anti-Dragnea fight for defending democracy in Romania,” Turcan wrote on Facebook. She considers “it may have been useful” for Dacian Ciolos to specify on how many votes on behalf of his party the Opposition can rely on at a possible censure motion. “As the leader of the PNL [National Liberal party, ed.n.] group in the Chamber of Deputies, I have discussed with several colleagues in the opposition trying to figure out with whom Mr Ciolos is negotiating the overthrow of the PSD-ALDE [Social Democratic Party, major at rule, Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, minor at rule, ed.n.] government. Any vote would be of great help. It might have been useful for Mr Ciolos to specify on how many votes we can rely on his behalf for a possible censure motion. Thus, we can urge the lodging of a motion leading to the dismissal of the incompetent government maneuvered by Liviu Dragnea (including the removal from office of Mrs Carmen Dan, incompetent and abusive minister, former prefect of Teleorman at the time of the Ciolos government),” Turcan mentioned. She added that, although she has seen and heard a lot in politics, she still does not understand how anyone can negotiate the removal of a government having neither a parliamentary group nor a party.   PNL’s Orban: Ciolos’s attack...