Opposition party complains about LabMin Vasilescu to discrimination watchdog

The opposition Save Romania Union (USR) has made a complaint to the National Council for Combatting Discrimination (CNCD) over statements by Labour Minister Lia Olguta Vasilescu regarding President Klaus Iohannis and all German people. 

The correlation made by Ms Lia Olguta Vasilescu between "gassing" and Iohannis's German ethnic background is profoundly unfair and demeaning, USR said Monday in a press statement. 

"To assume that the Germans, not the Nazis and their collaborators, are responsible for the gassing is something not just untrue but also despicable. Equalling all speakers of a language around the world to a criminal group is abject, pure and simple. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) has built an election campaign on discrimination and xenophobia and it now continues with impunity. It seems that the Greater Romania Party has never disappeared from the political stages, but has now taken the shape of roses," USR Senator Vlad Alexandrescu is quoted as saying in the press statement. 

The USR says in its complaint to CNCD that the attack against the president for his ethnic background is an act of negative discrimination that must be penalised according to the provisions of Ordinance 137/2000, arguing that "Vasilescu's statements are extremely serious that not even her ignorance of history can justify." 

"Romania was by no means alien to the Holocaust, as tens of thousands of Jews and Roma were killed under Marshal Ion Antonescu's leadership. It is the same Marshal Ion Antonescu whom Lia Olguta Vasilescu presented as a war hero in a speech to Parliament and she laid a wreath when she was a lawmaker of the [nationalistic] Greater Romania Party (PRM)," said Alexandrescu. 

In its complaint to CNCD, the USR mentions that Labour and Social Justice Minister Lia Olguta Vasilescu made a statement last Friday on a television station amidst a debate over an August 10 protest rally in Bucharest by Romanian expats, in response to the president's statement that "The PSD Government gassed and beat Romanians." 

Vasilescu said, among other things: "He said that PSD came to gas Romanians and beat them up. (...) The president has doled out that the Gendarmerie is with PSD - that is what I understand - that the secret services and whatnot are with him. They are state bodies. To speak of gassing as a German takes a lot of courage." 

USR therefore says that direct allegations concerning the head of state and the attack at him by demeaning allegations about that ethnicity is a discriminatory act that must be penalised according to the provisions of Ordinance 137/2000.