Move comes after Marcel Ciolacu’s pro-EU coalition candidate fails to advance to the presidential run-off.Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu has resigned, a day after a far-right opposition leader won the first round of the presidential election rerun and his own candidate crashed out of the race.
Ciolacu said on Monday that his centre-left Social Democratic Party (PSD) would withdraw from the pro-Western coalition – effectively ending it – while cabinet ministers will stay on in an interim capacity until a new majority emerges after the presidential run-off.
Hard-right eurosceptic George Simion decisively swept the ballot on Sunday, with some 41 percent of votes, and will face Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, an independent centrist, in a May 18 run-off. Coalition candidate Crin Antonescu came third.
“Rather than let the future president replace me, I decided to resign myself,” Ciolacu said.
Although Ciolacu’s leftist PSD won the most seats in a December 1 parliamentary election, Simion’s Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and two other far-right groupings, one with overt pro-Russian sympathies, won more than a third of the seats to become a clear political force. Advertisement
The Social Democrats had formed a coalition government with the centrist Liberals and ethnic Hungarian UDMR to help keep the European Union and NATO state on a pro-Western course. A governing majority that cordons off the far-right in the legislature cannot be formed without it.
“This coalition is no longer legitimate,” Ciolacu told reporters after a party meeting.
Before the meeting, Ciolacu stated that one of the conditions of forming the coalition was to field a common candid …