Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta conceded defeat in a presidential runoff against his conservative opponent Klaus Iohannis, who secured a clear victory, early results released yesterday showed.
“I congratulated Mr Iohannis on his victory. The people are always right,” Ponta said after polls showed he would lose.
“We’ve won!” wrote Iohannis, the ethnic German center-right mayor of the medieval Transylvanian city of Sibiu, on Facebook.
Photo: Reuters
According to the first partial results announced by the electoral office early yesterday — based on voting at a third of polling stations — Iohannis secured an overwhelming victory with 55.8 percent of the vote against 44.2 percent for Mr Ponta.
Earlier exit polls had put the candidates neck and neck. The upset came after a record number of voters went to the polls, with officials putting the turnout at more than 62 percent.
The election is seen as pivotal for one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has struggled to combat an entrenched culture of corruption.
In the first round on Nov. 2, Ponta took 40 percent of the vote against 30 percent for Iohannis. However, 46 percent of the ballots cast abroad were for Iohannis compared to 16 percent for Ponta.
“The vote has been phenomenal. The turnout was huge,” Iohannis told supporters at his campaign headquarters.
Seen as a poor television performer who goes out of his way to avoid conflict, observers say Iohannis has appealed to voters with his reliability and honesty in a country sick of government corruption, with several senior figures in Ponta’s formerly communist Social Democrat Party accused of graft.
Ponta’s main support base comes from the hugely influential Romanian Orthodox Church, as well as his party’s traditional electorate of the rural population, small business employees and the elderly.
Ahead of the vote experts said Romania’s diaspora, of about three million, could play a key role in swinging the result. Only 160,000 were able to cast their ballots in the first round due to an insufficient number of polling stations in countries including France, Germany and the UK.
On Sunday, long queues of people waited outside polling stations in Paris, London and several other cities, including the southern English city of Portsmouth, according to pictures shown on Romanian television.
In the evening, thousands were still waiting to vote in some European cities, sparking renewed anger at the way the vote has been organized.
At the Romanian embassy in Paris police used tear gas to disperse hundreds of would-be voters who said they had not been able to cast their ballot. In Bucharest, several thousand people took to the streets in solidarity with expatriates they said were being “prevented from voting.”
Despite progress in reforming the justice system — which has even seen a former minister jailed for corruption — many were fearful of a backlash if Ponta became president. On what was dubbed “Black Tuesday” in December last year, Ponta’s government passed a series of new laws granting immunity to elected officials. The changes were ultimately blocked, but Ponta’s critics said the episode served as a wake-up call.
KINGPIN: Marset allegedly laundered the proceeds of his drug enterprise by purchasing and sponsoring professional soccer teams and even put himself in the starting lineups Notorious Latin American narco trafficker Sebastian Marset, who eluded police for years, was handed over to US authorities after his arrest on Friday in Bolivia. Marset, a Uruguayan national who was on the US most-wanted list, was passed to agents of the US Drug Enforcement Administration at Santa Cruz airport in Bolivia, then put on a US airplane, Bolivian state television showed. “The arrest and deportation were carried out pursuant to a court order issued by the US justice system,” Bolivian Minister of Government Marco Antonio Oviedo told reporters. The alleged kingpin was arrested in an upscale neighborhood of Santa
ACTIONABLE ADVICE: The majority of chatbots tested provided guidance on weapons, tactics and target selections, with Perplexity and Meta AI deemed to be the least safe From school shootings to synagogue bombings, leading artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots helped researchers plot violent attacks, according to a study published on Wednesday that highlighted the technology’s potential for real-world harm. Researchers from the nonprofit watchdog Center for Countering Digital Hate and CNN posed as 13-year-old boys in the US and Ireland to test 10 chatbots, including ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Perplexity, Deepseek and Meta AI. Eight of the chatbots assisted the make-believe attackers in more than half the responses, providing advice on “locations to target” and “weapons to use” in an attack, the study said. The chatbots had become a “powerful accelerant for
SCANDAL: Other images discovered earlier show Andrew bent over a female and lying across the laps of a number of women, while Mandelson is pictured in his underpants A photograph of former British prince Andrew and veteran politician Peter Mandelson sitting in bathrobes alongside late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was unearthed on Friday in previously published documents. The image is believed to be the first known photograph of the two men with Epstein. They are currently engulfed in scandal in the UK over their ties to their mutual friend. The undated photograph, first reported by ITV News, shows King Charles III’s disgraced brother and former British ambassador to the US sitting barefoot outside on a wooden deck. They appear to have mugs with a US flag on them
Since the war in the Middle East began nearly two weeks ago, the telephone at Ron Hubbard’s bomb shelter company in Texas has not stopped ringing. Foreign and US clients are rushing to buy his bunkers, seeking refuge in case of air raids, nuclear fallout or apocalypse. With the US and Israel pounding Iran, and Tehran retaliating with strikes across the region, Hubbard has seen demand for his product soar, mostly from Gulf nation customers in Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. “You can imagine how many people are thinking: ‘I wish I had a bomb shelter,’” Hubbard, 63, said in
RSS