Former Romanian PM talks about ruling party’s crisis, starts petition for party reform

Former prime minister Adrian Nastase started an online petition calling for a reform of the ruling party PSD (the Social Democratic Party), in which he also talks about the party’s crisis and the political failure at the European elections. Nastase is also a former leader of the Romanian Social Democrats.

“Faced with PSD’s failure in European Parliament elections, we believe it is our moral duty to help the main left party get out of the crisis it’s in. We say it firmly to avoid confusion: we are not dissident within the PSD, we do not want to be a party inside the party,” the former PM says in his petition.

However, he adds that the European elections’ result is not the main cause of the crisis, “but the loss of electoral confrontation has been the inevitable consequence of PSD policies in recent years.” In his opinion, PSD’s crisis has four essential dimensions, namely identity, management, human resources, and communication.

Nastase explains, among other things, that the street protests of 2017-2018 caused a huge wave of hatred against PSD, which was "unloaded" during the European Parliament elections. “The change of two governments that have not taken unpopular measures in the field of criminal policy has been a strong blow to PSD's credibility,” he says.

Moreover, he also talks about the failure of the referendum for changing the definition of family in the Constitution (which was organized last autumn), saying that this “has psychologically prepared the outcome of the European Parliament elections. He also accuses former president Traian Basescu and current president Klaus Iohannis of dividing the society.

The perception that PSD wants to turn Romania away from Europe, fueled by the critical messages the party sent to the European Union (such as the ones related to double standard, the CVM or Schengen) also had a “devastating electoral impact.”

“In this political context, even positive measures on wages and pensions have lost their electoral impact because they have not been perceived as instruments of a social-democratic vision of society but as a hidden electoral bribe. This explains why a large part of the beneficiaries of the PSD social policies didn’t feel obliged to defend the party in elections,” Nastase also says in his petition.

He also lists some measures the ruling party could take to exit this crisis. For example, the former PM believes PSD has to define its identity, it has to put an end to the policy of hatred and division, to open itself to the society, and to govern transparently and effectively.

The full text of the online petition, which so far gathered about 730 signatures, is available