"We should hold more than one ceremony, because we, dear colleagues, have memory problems (...) I'm talking about the public memory and the public memory is by no means just the job of historians, nor the work of politicians alone, but it must be a concern of the entire nation and, of course, in the responsibilities of the public people of that nation, including politicians", Antonescu said.
He said that even in such times Senators give in to the circumstances " and the state president in office is not invited, in response to perfectly similar and just as unnatural things that the president in office committed in different circumstances."
Antonescu said that this should lead to a meditation on "institutions and traditions" because no powerful nation lives on memories alone, "but all powerful nations built on memory."
The former president of the Liberal Party considered that politically there were four major institutions in Romania, by tradition: the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, the Monarchy and the National Liberal Party.
"Do not be scandalized, I am just talking about history, and sometimes history does not concern all of us," added Antonescu, referring to the PNL nomination.
He added that it was not random that the dictatorship regimes subsequent to the communist regime suppressed all four institutions, out of which after the 1989 Revolution three of them were revived, while for the monarchy there was a "proper recovery of historical memory."