Influential Romanian journalist joins USR-PLUS alliance to coordinate elections campaign

Moise Guran, one of the most influential journalists in Romania, has decided to switch to politics and coordinate the electoral campaign of the USR-PLUS alliance for the local and parliamentary elections in 2020.

Guran announced his decision at Europa FM radio station, where he has worked, and on his blog. He will become a member of Save Romania Union (USR), where he will work on strategy and communication, and will coordinate the electoral campaign of the USR-PLUS alliance, according to Digi24.ro.

“I have decided to permanently give up my career and my role as a Romanian journalist, in order to assume a political role in this country,” Guran said in a broader radio intervention in which he explained his decision.

“I leave everything behind, definitively (because there is no way to return from politics to journalism), to go where decisions are made. I’ve commented enough from the sidelines, debated ideas, supported them and insisted on them to obsession sometimes. I’ve insisted that you contradict me and analyze critically, with your own minds, what I or others like me say. Now I think I and you are needed where the ideas turn into reality,” he added.

Moise Guran, 45, is one of the most popular economic journalists and commentators in Romania. In recent years, he also focused on political matters. He graduated from the law school of the Bucharest University and then joined the BBC television school. He started as a newspaper reporter in 1994 and joined the Antena 1 TV station in 1999. He became popular for his TV programs in which he tried to make economic analysis accessible to a wider audience. His first such program was BizBazar on Antena 3, which he made from 2005 until 2010 when he left the Antena group. He then went to the public television TVR, where he started a new program, known as Biziday. In 2011, he started the 'Romania in Direct' (Romania Live) talk show on Europa FM radio, a program in which he debated the hot topics of the day with the listeners.

He gave up on television in 2016 and moved his Biziday program online. He later turned Biziday into an app aimed at promoting verified news, in an attempt to counter the rising fake news phenomenon.

In recent years, he openly supported the protests against the controversial reforms and measures adopted by the former Social Democrat government. In November 2019, he moderated the only electoral debate before the first round of the presidential elections, in which the top two candidates - president Klaus Iohannis and former prime minister Viorica Dancila - declined to participate.