Ludovic Orban
Ludovic Orban always positioned himself as a center-right politician and has been rather constant in his political views. Romania's president, Klaus Iohannis, nominated Ludovic Orban, the 56-year-old leader of the opposition National Liberal Party (PNL), as the new prime minister-designate. This followed a vote of no-confidence that ousted the government of Social Democrat (PSD) Viorica Dancila. In neighboring Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has congratulated his Romanian counterpart. The appointment of Ludovic Orban will further deepen international confusion between the two states, generated by the capital cities Bucharest and Budapest, and now by the two countries' Prime Ministers, both named Orban, and both born in May 1963, a few days apart.
A political veteran and former transport minister, Orban now had ten days to form a new cabinet, which will then need to receive parliamentary approval. It will be a hard task, given parliamentary arithmetic and the demands from each political party that could vote in favour. It remains to be seen if Orban is capable of gathering the level of support required. The new Prime Minister pledged to remedy what he called the damages done to the economy and the judiciary during the three years of Social-Democrat rule. The purpose of the new Government was to restore the confidence of Romania's Euro-Atlantic partners, shaken in recent years by the Social-Democrats' controversial reforms. In turn, the new Government wanted to keep the budget deficit in check, to draft the budget for 2020 and begin a wide-scale process of institutional reform.
Ludovic Orban was born in Brasov, in May 1963, in a Hungarian-Romanian family (his father was Hungarian and his mother was Romanian). He graduated from the Andrei Saguna College in the city and then from the Machine Engineering Faculty in Brasov. He also studied politics at the Political Studies University – SNSPA in Bucharest. Orban is married and has a son. His older brother, Leonard Orban, was Romania’s first European commissioner (2007-2010) and former minister for European affairs (2011-2012).
Orban has been involved in politics for close to thirty years. He worked in local administration in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, during the 1990s and later served for almost two years as transport minister. He was a member of parliament from 2008 to 2016 and became his party’s official leader in June 2017. This followed a heavy defeat in domestic parliamentary elections in December 2016. Radu Magdin, a Romanian political analyst, described Orban as one of the last, if not the last, “liberal Mohicans”.
Orban has been the leader of the National Liberal Party (PNL) since 2017, leading the party to an important victory in the elections for the European Parliament, in May 2019. He was also the initiator of the no-confidence motion against the PSD Government of Viorica Dancila. Ludovic Orban has been a constant supporter of president Klaus Iohannis in recent years, although he wasn’t always the president’s first choice for the party’s leadership. Ludovic Orban joined the National Liberal Party (PNL) in the early 1990s. He started with positions in the local administration, such as member of the Local Council in Bucharest’s District 3 (in 1992) and, then, in District 1 (in 1996). He was a state secretary in Romania’s Government in 1999-2000. In 2004, he became deputy mayor of Bucharest.
He made his way into top-level politics in 2007, when he was appointed as transport minister in Calin Popescu Tariceanu’s Government after the liberals broke the alliance with former president Traian Basescu’s democrat-liberals (PDL). In 2008, he was elected as a member of the Chamber of Deputies, a position in which he was reelected in 2012 and 2016. He was also deputy president of the Chamber of Deputies between 2009 and 2011.
In 2007, when he was serving as transport minister, Ludovic Orban was involved in a car accident in Bucharest and left the scene, going to the police after 30 hours. For this, he lost his driver’s license. Orban apparently lost control of his car on a street close to the Cotroceni Palace and hit another car. A girl on the sidewalk was slightly injured. Orban left the scene of the accident together with the victim. He denied the incident and so did the girl’s parents, but the prosecutors determined the girl was injured in the accident. However, Orban was not prosecuted as the injuries were only minor.
In 2016, just as Orban was preparing to run for mayor of Bucharest for the third time (he lost in 2008 and 2012 to Sorin Oprescu), the National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) started investigating him for using his influence to get undue benefits for his elections campaign. The investigation was based on a denouncement filed by local businessman Tiberiu Urdareanu, who claimed that Orban had asked him for EUR 50,000 for his campaign. He withdrew from the race and resigned from his leadership positions in PNL saying that he would wait for justice to run its course. The High Court acquitted him of all charges in March 2018.
Romania's liberal-led government collapsed on 05 February 2020 after just four months in office, with 261 of the country's 465 MPs voting in favour of a no confidence motion against Prime Minister Ludovic Orban. A total of 319 lawmakers took part in the vote. Under the country's legislation, a no-confidence motion requires 233 votes or more to pass. "This government is now dismissed by parliament by a large margin," opposition Social Democrat Party leader Marcel Ciolacu said following the vote, which his party initiated. The Social Democrats' initiative was supported by the Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania, an ethnic minority party. Orban said after the vote, "The government has fallen, but it has fallen on its feet."
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