Showing posts with label Victor Ponta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Victor Ponta. Show all posts

October 22, 2012

Aggressive opportunist | European Voice

Aggressive opportunist | European Voice

 Romania's Prime Minister Victor Ponta risks all

By Andrew Gardner   -  18.10.2012 / 05:48 CET
Victor Ponta has a taste for the political ambush. In 2010, he won the leadership of Romania's Social Democrats (PSD) within five days of announcing his candidacy. This summer, in the space of four days, he used his position as his country's stop-gap prime minister to suspend the president and remove the speakers of parliament and the national ombudsman.
Ponta is clearly a man who strikes fast and effectively. To have become a prime minister at 39 also suggests an astute, calculating brain. Yet within weeks of President Traian Basescu's suspension, the European Commission – and, crucially, Germany's Social Democrats – forced him to issue a mea culpa in the form of 11 promises of corrective action. Somehow, a man who has a decade of political contacts with the European Union, and whose wife is a member of the European Parliament, had misjudged the EU.