Mureșan premier nomination challenged by Italian association
The Italian Association of Romania (RO.AS.IT.) is trying through the courts to overturn President Nicușor Dan’sdecree designating Siegfried Mureșan as candidate for prime minister.
The case was registered on 22 September with the Bucharest Court of Appeal’s Ninth Administrative and Tax Litigation Section. The defendants are the Presidential Administration and the autonomous administration Monitorul Oficial. The first hearing is scheduled for 28 September 2026.
Former judge Cristi Danileț, however, dismissed the lawsuit as “dead from the start”.
“After the nonsense of challenging the appointment of certain constitutional judges in court, I now see that the appointment of a prime minister is being challenged. I hope this is not the same lawyer with another absurd idea, dead from the start. Let me remind you that law students learn in their first year that presidential decrees cannot be challenged when they are acts of authority. So when a constitutional body issues an act of constitutional authority, ordinary justice has nothing to do with it,” he wrote on Facebook.
Romanian media call Mureșan a political ‘scarecrow’
It is telling that Romanian media broadly agree that Nicușor Dan’s decree is little more than an attempt to frighten political parties into reaching an agreement. Mureșan has already been nicknamed not a prime minister, but a “scarecrow”.
That view is based on the fact that the candidate lacks parliamentary support. The PNL, USR and UDMR support him, but together they hold only 170 seats, while the PSD and AUR have already said they will not vote for his government.
Journalists believe the real candidate will come from the PSD once society has rejected the “scarecrow” option represented by Mureșan.
“President Nicușor Dan nominated Siegfried Mureșan in order to make him look ridiculous, kill off the Siegfried Mureșan option in the minds of Romanians and, in doing so, make Bolojan and the liberals look ridiculous as well. The next proposal will be centred on the PSD, if not on a PSD-AUR majority alliance, which people in Romanian politics are already beginning to discuss openly,” sociologist Mirel Palada said on Subjectul Zilei with Răzvan Dumitrescu.
A court decision is expected on 28 September.
RO.AS.IT. enters Romania’s government crisis
RO.AS.IT. is a private-law ethnic organisation with public utility status, founded in Suceava in 1993. It represents Romania’s Italian minority, receives state funding through the Department for Interethnic Relations, and the Italian minority has representation in the Chamber of Deputies.
The challenge to the Mureșan premier nomination therefore adds another layer to Romania’s already tangled government crisis. Formally, it is a court case over a presidential decree. Politically, it looks more like another sign that the nomination itself was never treated as a serious route to forming a stable government.
If the courts reject the case, Mureșan will still face the same basic problem: a nomination without the votes to become prime minister. If the lawsuit gains traction, Nicușor Dan’s tactical move will have created not pressure on the parties, but another institutional embarrassment.
