Crin Antonescu: Stray Liberals May Return To The Party

Liberals who have left the party may return only if they prove to be "honest people," said National Liberal Party (PNL) President Crin Antonescu, quoted by Agerpres. In his opinion, all "colleagues who left us" and then realized "the emptiness of the promises made to them and the embarrassment they brought upon themselves can now react and make decisions, but now and not after Basescu"s fall, because that would cost them their credibility." Antonescu further said the "defectors" played "a pitiful hoax with Stolojan without realizing the true face of their new master."

"If Mr. Valeriu Stoica, who claims to be a strategist, imagined that Mr. Basescu would ever entrust him the project of rebuilding the rightist forces, he was mistaking and I am surprised to see that someone of Mr. Stoica"s experience and skill could fall for that. As for the others, I don"t think they left for doctrinaire reasons. I don"t think they left because they couldn"t find themselves in Tariceanu"s Liberalism and were planning to come back after Tariceanu"s departure. I think they simply left because the fall of the Tariceanu Government seemed imminent at that time. They left out of opportunism. They left because they gave in to various forms of pressure or maybe even blackmail... They had to accept the orders from the Presidency. The fact that they are not happy with how they have been treated in Mr. Basescu"s court or in the current Government is their business and has nothing to do with Liberalism," Antonescu said.

In his view, if those who left the party have now realized the proportion of the mistake they made when the joined the dead-end alliance with PSD imposed by Traian Basescu, they can still make amends. "Sooner or later, we need to put a stop to this political hitchhiking towards an opportunistic destination that always changes depending on the political context and who is in power or not," Antonescu added.