President, PM to meet tete-a-tete

Premier Adrian Nastase is set to go to the Cotroceni Palace today to make it plain and clear to President Iliescu: “I am the party and the party wants early elections in 2003.”
This is an unprecedented decision made one day before the Permanent Delegation of the PSD (Social Democrat Party), that is having only Adrian Nastase represent the party at the Cotroceni Palace and signal Iliescu that all the leaders support Nastase and the early elections.
Ion Iliescu will find himself unable to have other views than the one presented by Nastase, with his “reservations” about the early elections making no impact. PSD’s spiritual leader Ion Iliescu is anyway making a lesser and lesser impact on a party that wants to stay in power at all costs.
The decision of the Permanent Delegation also means that none of the PSD leaders has anything to tell the chief of state about corruption and about the situation of the country after the NATO and EU summits, other than what Nastase will tell him. Prior to leaving for Copenhagen to attend the EU summit, President Iliescu said fighting corruption was more important an issue than the early elections, and he was planning to discuss it during the meeting with PSD. He will now discuss this issue only with the PSD leader.
The official explanation provided by general secretary Cozmin Gusa yesterday is that the party is “most confident Adrian Nastase is the best choice to represent it.” Gusa specified PSD wanted to settle the early elections issue once and for all in January, before the beginning of the parliamentary session, so that a new meeting with the chief of state in this regard had been scheduled for after New Year’s.
The fact that Nastase goes to Cotroceni alone leaves room for yet more speculations: the PM and the chief of state may reach a secret agreement on early elections and then a new meeting will be held, this time with everyone else invited, with the decision made passed as unanimously supported.
A similar situation was registered before the 1996 elections, when Ion Iliescu and Adrian Nastase had a private conversation about the reservations of the chief of state in running side by side with PDSR (Party of Social Democracy in Romania). Back then, the press and the party leaders alike hypothesised about their alleged agreement; the conditions Iliescu imposed in order to agree to supervise the party slates and support PDSR in its campaign remain unknown as of yet.
Moreover, PSD’s decision means it is unwilling to give in to the arguments of the other parliamentary parties, feeling it can make a decision about the early elections on its own. “If they are against these early elections, then we’ve got nothing to say to each other,” Cozmin Gusa says, referring to the other parties, with the only concession made to UDMR (Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania), which has allegedly “toned” its opposition.