Presidential candidate and ex-PM Victor Ponta faces backlash after claiming he flooded Romanian villages to save Belgrade in 2014

Former prime minister Victor Ponta, currently running for president as an independent candidate with an isolationist agenda, claimed that in his capacity as head of the executive in 2014, he prevented the flooding of Belgrade by opening the Iron Gates dam to flood several Romanian villages instead.

He said the government paid compensations for the damages incurred on the Romanian territory and assured that nobody was at risk during the operation.

For this, Serbia awarded him citizenship, Ponta claimed in a podcast broadcast by Evenimentul Zilei daily on April 9.

"No Romanian in Romania was in danger, no household was seriously affected - but we saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives in Serbia, a neighboring people who love Romanians," Victor Ponta wrote on Facebook.

The direct beneficiaries of the unexpected statements are the far-right presidential candidate George Simion (a rival of Ponta and the leading candidate in the May 4/18 elections) but also the ruling coalition's candidate Crin Antonescu – who also shares a segment of the electorate with Ponta and hopes to make it to the second ballot.

It remains unclear why Victor Ponta decided to make such statements. Formally, he was explaining how he got Serbian citizenship. However, the electoral and political costs of the disclosure were very high and predictable. Ponta is now losing traction among his nationalist electorate, to the benefit of his rival George Simion. Furthermore, all the other presidential candidates have attacked him on the topic.

G4Media and Info Sud-Est surveyed dozens of TikTok and Facebook pages populated by supporters of EU-skeptic Calin Georgescu – who is still seen as the spiritual leader of the isolationist movement even if he is not running in the presidential elections – and concluded that Victor Ponta is rapidly losing ground.

Following Ponta's claims about preventing Belgrade's flooding at the cost of several Romanian villages, Romanian prime minister Marcel Ciolacu urged the former to abandon the presidential campaign.

"As prime minister, one has to often make difficult decisions. But they should never be kept secret. Admitting with no hesitation, after years, that you agreed, as prime minister of Romania, to flood Romanian villages to protect foreign cities and to be proud about receiving, as a reward, the citizenship of another state, makes you clearly anything but a sovereignist!" said PM Ciolacu, in a post published on Facebook.