The leaders of the PSD and PNL organizations in Bucharest, Gabriela Firea and Sebastian Burduja, who applied to be their party’s mayoral candidates, will lead the campaign staff of the coalition in Bucharest, announced the general secretary of the PSD.
According to Stanescu, Firea, who was the mayor of Bucharest between 2016 and 2020, will appear in the runner-up position on the PSD-PNL joint European Parliament candidate list.
To the journalist’s question whether the director of the university hospital can defeat the mayor Nicusor Dan, who has been in office since 2020, and the mayor of the fifth district, Cristian Popescu Piedone, who is also applying for the office, and who were measured with over 30 percent support in public opinion polls, the Secretary General of the PSD he said: the election is an open competition, and the governing parties “will do everything to make Catalin Cirstoiu the mayor of Bucharest”.
Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and Liberal Speaker Nicolae Ciuca will formally present the joint mayor candidate of the governing parties on Wednesday, the PSD and PNL press service announced in the invitation sent to the media.
In mid-February, the Romanian governing parties announced that they would enter into an electoral alliance, but their original agreement in principle only applies to the European Parliament elections, not to local government elections. In the last few days, however, the national leadership of the PNL and PSD prepared a comprehensive agreement for the municipal elections in Bucharest, which now also covers the positions of district mayors, capital and district municipal representative bodies.
The governing parties want to replace the current independent mayor Nicusor Dan, who is preparing to re-run. The founding president of the opposition Save Romania Association (USR), who left the USR earlier, won office as an independent in 2020 with the support of the PNL and USR, as a right-wing challenger to the social democratic mayor Gabriela Firea. In the meantime, Nicusor Dan lost the support of the PNL, but the USR, which joined forces with two other parties in December to form the United Right-Wing Alliance, assured him of its support.
The office of mayor of Bucharest is the office with the second largest voter support in Romania after the head of state: Nicusor Dan won 42.8 percent of the valid votes, almost 283 thousand votes, in 2020, while Fireara, who held the office until then, received 38 percent of those who went to the polls. more than a quarter of a million citizens of Bucharest cast their votes.
In Romania, municipal elections are single-round, and the office of mayor – and county council president – is won by the candidate who gets the most votes (but not necessarily the absolute majority of votes).
2024-03-19 20:24:42