Romanian presidential candidate and former Prime Minister Victor Ponta is facing calls to withdraw from the race after revealing he allowed several local villages on the Danube to be flooded in 2014 to avoid flooding the Serbian capital of Belgrade.
Ponta told a podcast Wednesday that more than a decade ago, during his time as prime minister, he ordered open floodgates on the Danube between Romania and Serbia — despite opposition from Romanian authorities — to save Belgrade from floods. Four Romanian villages and 1,500 hectares of farmland and forest downstream were affected, according to a report from the Romanian public radio at the time.
“I spoke to [the Romanian emergency response authority], I moved people, I gave relief fast and you, the press, didn’t find out anything,” Ponta told journalists Robert Turcescu and Dan Andronic.
Belgrade’s parliament made him an honorary Serbian citizen as a result, Ponta said. He plans to renounce that citizenship to become Romanian president.
“It’s Belgrade. I like Belgrade and I like Serbia very much,” Ponta added.
His admission adds to a tumultuous presidential election in Romania that is a rerun of a November 2024 round the country’s top court canceled over allegations of Russian influence in favor of ultranationalist candidate Călin Georgescu.
Georgescu has been banned from running this time, and Ponta, who left his former Social Democratic Party, is running as an independent on a nationalist, “Romania First” platform trying to attract Georgescu’s voters.
Some recent polls show Ponta coming in second in a first round of the presidential election, after far-right candidate George Simion.
His admission that he prioritized the Serbian capital over Romanian villages led to calls for withdrawal from his former Social Democrat colleagues, Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu.
“In no case does anyone believe you anymore that you’re a sovereignist and that you’d die fighting neck-and-neck with everybody for your people and your country,” Ciolacu wrote to Ponta in a Facebook post, where he called on his former party colleague to leave the presidential race.
Ciolacu was an honorary adviser to Ponta at the time of the floods, according to Romanian media outlet HotNews.
Grindeanu said Ponta’s admission about the floods shows he always puts himself first, also calling on him to withdraw.
Ciolacu and Grindeanu’s Social Democratic Party are supporting Crin Antonescu in the presidential race, in cooperation with the National Liberal Party, which Antonescu led, and the Hungarian minority party the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania.
Bucharest Mayor Nicușor Dan, who’s running for president as an independent, called on Ciolacu to publish and declassify all documents relating to Ponta’s decisions around the 2014 floods.
Ponta told POLITICO that he will “always choose to save human lives over fields. This is what it means to be a crisis leader.”
The nationalist candidate also rejected calls from Prime Minister Ciolacu to leave the presidential race, threatening to fire him if he becomes president.
He wrote in a Facebook post Thursday: “No Romanian from Romania was in any danger, no household was seriously impacted — but we saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives in Serbia, a neighboring nation who loves Romanians.”
Mircea Dinescu, a Romanian poet who owns property in one of the affected villages, said he would sue Ponta for damage, according to Romanian TV outlet Digi24. He denied receiving any relief from the government, as Ponta claimed. Ponta didn’t respond to a request for comment in response to Dinescu.
The post Romanian presidential hopeful under fire after admitting role in village flooding appeared first on Politico.
