December 22, 2014 UPDATE
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Mihai Pelin, 22.12.2014, 19:42
Pro-European parties in the Republic of Moldova, an ex-soviet country with a Romanian-speaking majority are carrying on talks in a bid to forge a ruling coalition in the country. The Liberal-Democratic Party, the Democratic Party and the Liberal Party have mustered 55 seats in the new Legislature, which has a total of 101 seats. The number allows them to form a Parliament majority in order to vote for a government, but it’s not enough to vote for the president or make amendments to the Constitution. The former soviet republic held parliamentary election on November 30th and the future Legislature in Chisinau must convene in a session in a month at the latest, until December 30th.
Romania’s newly elected president Klaus Iohannis held talks with Prime Minister Victor Ponta in Bucharest on Monday. High on the agenda were the top priorities of his term in office, current political and economic issues as well as the prospects of the institutional cooperation between the presidency and the government. President Iohannis has announced his intention to summon shortly the political parties for talks in order to set together national goals and work out a timetable with stages and actions to be implemented. Klaus Iohannis was sworn in on Sunday in a solemn session of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The new head of state said he was grateful and honored by the confidence the Romanians showed in him. The president pledged deep changes in society, a corruption-free country with a reformed political class.
The Republic of Moldova will import natural gas from Romania by means of the Iasi-Ungheni pipeline. The two sides signed a sale contract in Chisinau on Monday. Deliveries to the former soviet country are due to begin on January 1st 2015 and the gas price will stay around 277 dollars for one thousand cubic meters, 55 dollars below the price of the Russian gas. The 43 meter long Iasi-Ungheni pipeline was officially inaugurated in August last year. Its transport capacity is around 1.5 billion cubic meters, more than the annual consumption of the Republic of Moldova.
We recall that 25 years ago, on December 22nd Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife fled Bucharest. The event marked the collapse of the communist dictatorship in Romania in a sweeping outburst of hundreds of thousands of protesters against the country’s regime. Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were subsequently caught and executed, following a cursory trial. The anti-communist revolt flared up on December 16th, 1989 in the western Romanian city of Timisoara and rapidly spread across the capital and other big cities in Romania. More than 1,000 people died and nearly 3,400 others were wounded. Romania is the former eastern Bloc’s only country where the change of regime occurred violently and where the communist leaders were executed.
