Geoana: Basescu Wants To Take Control Over MAI To Influence Elections

Social Democrat Party (PSD) President Mircea Geoana yesterday accused President Traian Basescu of planning to take control over the Ministry of Administration and Interior (MAI) in order to influence the results of the forthcoming presidential elections. The remarks were made at the beginning of a PSD Executive Committee meeting.

"At this point, a political crisis on top of the economic and social crisis would be an unacceptable risk for Romania. I hope that we will stand united and serve the greater good after the incumbent President"s attempt to turn PSD into the scapegoat for the errors of the coalition and, of course, out of a nearly obsessive desire to take over not only the financial controls through middlemen, which do not exclude power controls such as MAI, in order to keep them at bay and possibly influence the political result of the elections," Geoana said and was quoted by NewsIn.

• PSD threatens to impose parliamentary control over intelligence services

On a different topic, PSD President Mircea Geoana expressed fear that the Social Democrats were "co-ordinately spied on by the current political regime." In his opinion, the incumbent President wants to turn PSD into "the black sheep" of the coalition.

"I would like to express my concern with the increasing number of cases in which conversations of ours and things that should remain, after all, within our party or our private lives, are more and more often spied on. My fear is that this is done in a coordinated way by the current political regime, which is using and abusing the power of the Romanian State," he said.

The PSD president warned that his party was going to take steps to improve parliamentary control over intelligence services so that "our republic should not turn into a police state."