Former PSD leader Liviu Dragnea launches cooking channel on YouTube

Former leader of Romania’s Social Democratic Party (PSD), Liviu Dragnea, has launched a YouTube channel dedicated to cooking. The first episode has gathered nearly 90,000 views and over 1,200 comments in the 15 hours since it was posted.

Dragnea, who was one of Romania's most powerful politicians, was jailed for corruption in 2019 and released two years later.

Liviu Dragnea’s first recipe for his new YouTube channel is for a dish made with beans. During the video (which is available here), he praises the benefits of "manganese," which he claims is good for increasing male fertility, and criticizes supermarkets, according to Profit.ro. The video’s comments section has been awash with irony, with most users referencing the period when Dragnea was in detention.

Dragnea's YouTube channel, called "Bucătăria de acasă" (The Kitchen at Home), promotes healthy food, according to the PSD leader. The former politician noted that he would present the main benefits of the ingredients going into each of his dishes.

Between 2017 and 2019, Liviu Dragnea was seen as one of Europe’s autocratic leaders, alongside Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban and the head of Poland’s conservative party PiS, for the way he used his power to try and break the justice system while ignoring the European Union’s principles. At the helm of the Social Democratic party, he wrapped himself in nationalist rhetoric and launched long diatribes against foreign corporations, EU officials, internal opposition, NGOs, and the media. His fall from grace meant that he was shunned from the party he once led with an iron fist.

The former Social Democrat leader was jailed on May 27, 2019, after the High Court of Cassation and Justice sentenced him to three years and six months in prison in the case of the fictitious hiring at the Teleorman Child Protection Service. Prosecutors showed during the trial that Dragnea made it so the county's Social and Child Protection Service hired and paid two women who were, in fact, working at the PSD office in Teleorman. In other words, the public institution paid the two women’s wages while their actual work was for the party. The damages, namely the salaries paid to the two women, were estimated at RON 108,000 (EUR 23,000).