President Igor Dodon welcomes last week’s decision concerning the President’s role in designating the candidate for Prime Minister taken by the Constitutional Court. According to him, this decision is late, but necessary as it contains a number of important things, IPN reports.
“The first thing – the President cannot be suspended for five minutes so that the Speaker or the Prime Minister could take over, as they did during the time of Plahotniuc. Right in this hall, I not only once said that what happened in 2017-2018 was illegal as a President was suspended from post by the Constitutional Court’s decision in order to allow someone to sign decrees instead of him,” President Dodon said after the meeting of senior state officials.
According to him, the CC, by its decision, ultimately shed light. “Why is it late? Because the Venice Commission spoke about this back last June-July. What is yet important is that this thing became clear in last week’s decision,” stated President Dodon.
He noted the CC also said an important thing – that the formalized parliamentary majority can field a candidate and this should be accepted by the President. “What does formalized parliamentary majority mean? Under the Parliament’s Regulations, the parliamentary majority is announced in the Parliament’s sitting. Not the signing by 51 MPs in favor of a candidate for premiership. I think such a formalized majority in the current Parliament without our participation is impossible,” stated Igor Dodon.
According to him, if the President does not accept this candidate, the constitutional procedure starts, when 67 votes of MP are needed to suspend the President. “In the current Parliament, we do not have any chance. But even if this happens, a referendum should be held in 30 days and as many people as those who elected the President four years ago should vote for his dismissal there, plus one vote. This is 836,000 people, but this is impossible in the current situation,” he stated.
The CC passed its judgment after it was notified by MP Igor Munteanu, who asked the Court to explain if the President holds an absolute discretionary margin when designing the candidate for Prime Minister or this is obliged to name the candidate proposed by the parliamentary majority as a result of consultations.
