The Social Democratic Party (PSD) will decide on Sunday, June 21, whether to join the ruling coalition cobbled together by prime minister-designate Adrian Vestea, PSD president Sorin Grindeanu announced on the morning of June 18, according to Curs de Guvernare.

At that time, PM-designate Vestea was supposed to deliver the ruling strategy and the list of ministers to Parliament, backed by PSD, several dissident Liberal (PNL) MPs, and a very diverse collection of lawmakers mostly of far-right extraction, after a day and a night of (apparently unsuccessful) efforts to find a ruling majority. 

PSD’s Grindeanu said he had a lot of respect for Vestea, but his party must carefully evaluate the ruling strategy.

“I informed him that the PSD's decision to enter or not is not long in coming," he declared on Thursday, June 18, after the PSD meeting.

The mandate of the PM-designate Vestea expires on June 24, when he must either request Parliament’s nomination vote or abandon the attempt. 

On June 14, president Nicusor Dan appointed Vestea, a vice-president of PNL, to form a government, without notifying his Liberal party, or any party whatsoever, in what PNL president and acting PM Ilie Bolojan described as a “hostile” action.

Centre-right parties PNL, USR, and the Hungarians' Union UDMR, but also the far-right AUR and SOS Romania, refused to back the unexpected and largely inappropriate nomination, leaving the Social Democrats (PSD) as the sole parliamentary party behind Vestea.

Analysts familiar with the negotiations, such as former PNL president Ludovic Orban, established that the support achieved by PM-designate Vestea is insufficient, even after the amalgamation of small far-right parliamentary groups such as PACE Romania First (former SOS and POT MPs) or United for Romania (former POT MPs, including Anamaria Gavrila and former PSD MP Victor Ponta).

The participation of MPs from AUR thus became necessary, unless a larger number of PNL MPs were convinced to defy their party’s official position.

More than the PSD’s meeting on June 21, the Congress of the Liberal Party (PNL) on the same day, will host a confrontation between the party’s leadership represented by Ilie Bolojan, and the dissident faction opting to support the first PM-designate and party vice-president Adrian Vestea, despite a different prior formal decision of the party leadership. The dissident faction, gathering 16 of the 75 PNL MPs based on the list of lawmakers backing a legal action against the party’s decisions of June 15, seeks to overthrow party president Ilie Bolojan and take over the party, bringing it again as a partner of the Social Democrats. On June 15, the PNL leadership, with a vast majority, decided to exclude from the party those who disregard the party's official decisions.

The dissident faction within PNL challenged in court the party’s decision of June 15 not to back PM-designate Vestea and excluding from the party all the MPs disregarding this decision, as well as those party members accepting posts in the would-be cabinet. The Ilfov Court suspended the party’s decisions until a final ruling. The dissident PNL MPs argue that the party’s recommendation not to support PM-designate Vestea was an "imperative mandate", prohibited by Parliament's regulations, which state that parliamentarians vote according to their own conscience, liberal sources told G4Media.

(Photo: George Calin/ Inquam Photos)

iulian@romania-insider.com