A survey is an image. I would be a hypocrite to say that I do not like it , but there's a lot until the winter. Whatever the candidates, I'm sure it will be a very tight result. This is the way it has been in the last elections so I am guessing it will be the same now. We have a procedure that we approved and around August 1 we will hold a meeting of the National Council and only in September we will announce the candidate. What matters in the choice I’ll make is my belief, which was reinforced over these two and a half years I’ve been Prime Minister, that Romania, through its weird political system, is likely to evolve when the President and Prime Minister are working together. It was the same with NATO and the EU, when the two fight each other the country is having a hard time. If there is a man whom I believe will win, then I will remain prime minister. If not, I will look for a man to make a team with, he will be Prime Minister and I will be President. We'll see”, Ponta explained.
Still, Ponta spoke for the first time about the possibility that the one who would replace him, in case he became president, would not be from the PSD. “I’d give it less than 50% that he should be a member of PSD, UNPR, PC. I would rather believe that a wider discussion with all the political forces, I am not referring here to the PMP, but to the Liberals, the UDMR, all the others to find a Prime Minister with a larger support. That’s how I look at it. When I had support, I was able to do major changes” .
As for the possibility of appointing a candidate in the presidential elections, Ponta explained that there are several stages to go through until the official announcement.
“Things are definitely being performed in a certain sense. By August 1 we will know who will be the candidate on behalf of the USD. If there are several candidates, we must have a procedure to conduct an internal selection. Then we prepare the campaign, the country project, from this point of view, we did do this for the USL, when Crin Antonescu was candidate , we drafted a profile for the prime minister and a profile for the President. A president that should be the opposite of Traian Băsescu. We sketched this profile with Crin in mind, but since he left this paradigm , from my point of view he let himself be fooled and he was wrong”, the Premier explained.