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.
In response, Victor Ponta warned Ciolacu that, after winning the presidential elections, he would replace him with someone else at the top of the executive.
"I think Ciolacu should urgently resign from the position of prime minister - otherwise, I will dismiss him as soon as I become president!" Ponta responded with another Facebook post.
Meanwhile, Bucharest mayor Nicuşor Dan, who is also running for president in the May elections, asked prime minister Marcel Ciolacu to publish and declassify all documents underlying the decisions made by Victor Ponta during the 2014 floods. "Romanians have the right to know, transparently, what Victor Ponta's decision to flood Romanian villages along the Danube was based on," he said.
Crin Antonescu, the presidential candidate of the governing alliance of PSD-PNL-UDMR, also reacted to the news, criticizing Ponta in a message on social media: "[…] the fact that you were capable of directing the waters toward Romanian citizens without telling them, that you were capable of ignoring expert advice and flooding Romanian villages without warning anyone, and now you're proud of it - saying that, in return, you got the "tip" of another country's citizenship while you were prime minister of Romania... That truly defies all imagination." He also said Romanians "deserve to know the extent of the betrayal," Digi24 reported.
The leader of the DREPT party, Vlad Gheorghe, announced that he and his colleagues will file a criminal complaint against Victor Ponta for the crime of high treason, according to Agerpres.
iulian@romania-insider.com
(Photo source: Inquam Photos/George Calin)
