Mircea Geoana

Mircea Geoană (born July 14, 1958 in Bucharest ) is a politician in Romania and was Foreign Minister until 2004 . He is considered a skilled diplomat and was able to successfully complete the EU accession negotiations at the end of 2004 .

Life

Geoană studied law in Bucharest and Paris . Shortly after the overthrow of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu , he entered the foreign service, became spokesman for the ministry and in 1996 was sent to the United States as his country's youngest ambassador . His support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq goes back to these contacts .

In December 2000, Geoană became Romania's foreign minister and in 2001 chaired the OSCE . He directed the gaze of his peers beyond the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia. In a FAZ interview in 2004 he spoke out in favor of a stronger and "globally ambitious Europe"; That is the only reason why it is worth handing over so much national sovereignty to the EU .

In the local elections in June 2004, he was the social democratic lead candidate for Bucharest, but received only 29.7 percent of the vote. The incumbent mayor Traian Băsescu (Alliance for Justice and Truth) was re-elected with 54.9 percent. Before the presidential elections at the end of 2004, the political "foster son" of Ion Iliescu was named as the presumed successor to Prime Minister Adrian Năstase .

Since April 21, 2005 Geoană was the chairman of the social democratic party PSD . In the parliamentary elections in 2008 , he ran as the top candidate of his party and received the most votes with her. On December 19, 2008 he was elected President of the Romanian Senate .

At the end of 2009, Geoană was a PSD candidate for the presidential election . He won 31% of the vote in the first ballot and thus reached the runoff, in which he was extremely narrowly defeated on December 6th against incumbent Traian Băsescu . A few months later - on February 21, 2010 - he lost the PSD party chairmanship to Victor Ponta in a battle vote .

As a result, Geoană repeatedly quarreled with Ponta. On December 13, 2010, Ponta arranged for Geoană to be excluded from the PSD for an initial period of six months.

In spring 2015, Geoană founded the Partidul Social Românesc (Romanian Social Party), with which he took part in the 2016 local elections.

In July 2019 he was appointed as the successor to Rose Gottemoeller as Deputy Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg from October 2019.