Candidate Iohannis: Voting a right, not a slogan

Klaus Iohannis, running for president as the candidate of the Christian Liberal Alliance (ACL), defines himself as the candidate for which 'voting is not a slogan, but a right.'

'I am the candidate who thinks voting is not a slogan, but a right, for the emigration, too. I am the candidate who believes all should have conditions to vote. I am the candidate who believes a deep change is necessary in Romania; after 25 years we must have the courage to say: Stop and let's start over,' Iohannis said in a debate at B1 TV with his opponent Victor Ponta, the incumbent prime minister and candidate of the Social Democrat Party (PSD), National Union for Romania's Progress and Conservative Party.

Iohannis brought at the debate 'two big folders of letters sent by Romanians from the emigration to the Central Electoral Bureau, complaining they were not able to vote.'

'Perhaps, Mr Prime Minister, you should assign someone to answer those people why they were humiliated during the voting. There, at the voting, there were observers, and last night there was a mention we of the ACL did not send observers. I have checked. All the polling stations are here. There were 52 [observers] missing from the PSD, 19 from the ACL, and less of them from other organizations,' he mentioned.

Ponta had asserted at the first direct confrontation on TV with Iohannis on Tuesday that 132 representatives of the ACL were absent from the bureaus of the polling stations abroad in the first round of the presidential election, which forced the Foreign Affairs Ministry to supplement the staff supervising the elections abroad and spend public funds for this. AGERPRES