Romania Set for First Female, and First Muslim, Prime Minister
BUCHAREST, Romania — In a
surprise move, Romania’s
largest political party nominated a woman from the country’s Tatar minority for
prime minister on Wednesday. If she wins approval from the president and
Parliament, she will be both the first Muslim and the first woman to hold the
post.
The Social Democratic
Party scored a resounding victory in the Dec. 11 general election, winning more
than 45 percent of the vote. Together with its smaller ally, the Alliance of
Liberals and Democrats, it holds a majority of the seats in Parliament.
Ordinarily, the leader of
the largest party is designated by the country’s president to become prime
minister. But the Social Democrats’ leader, Liviu Dragnea, would have been a
problematic choice: He was convicted of electoral fraud and given a two-year
suspended sentence in April. President Klaus Iohannis has said that the
country’s next prime minister should be untainted by criminal convictions or
continuing investigations.
So the Social Democrats
turned instead to Sevil Shhaideh, 52, a relatively little-known figure who served
as minister of regional development for six months in the last Social
Democrat-led government.
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“It’s a surprising
choice,” said Sergiu Miscoiu, a professor of political science at Babes-Bolyai
University in Cluj. “People were expecting somebody controlled by Dragnea, but
from the party’s upper levels, not a relative newcomer.”
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“Picking Shhaideh
suggests that Dragnea will control the government without taking direct
responsibility,” Professor Miscoiu added. “She is not stained in a direct way,
so Iohannis has no official reason to reject her.”
Professor Miscoiu said
the choice might have also been intended to counter accusations of orthodoxism
and nationalism during the campaign. Referring to the Social Democratic Party,
he said: “P.S.D. are saying implicitly with this nomination: ‘You accused us of
being nationalist and orthodoxist — look what we do, don’t you like it?’ ”
The nomination of Ms.
Shhaideh took many observers by surprise.
“We have seen many names
put forward in the last days, but her name was not among them,” said Paul Ivan,
a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center in Brussels and a former
Romanian diplomat.
Ms. Shhaideh is thought
of as more of a manager than a politician, Mr. Ivan said. “She is seen as a
technocrat,” he said. “She’s an economist who has worked in local and regional
administration for many years.”
Ms. Shhaideh has spent
most of her career in Constanta, a port on the Black Sea, and not in Bucharest,
the capital. But she is seen as close to Mr. Dragnea. She was secretary of
state in the Development Ministry when Mr. Dragnea was its minister, succeeding
him when he stepped down in 2015. He attended her wedding to a Syrian
businessman.
Ms. Shhaideh and her
husband own three properties in Syria, according to a declaration of financial interests from
July 2015.
Muslim women have very
rarely served as heads of state or government in Europe. The few previous
examples were in countries with Muslim majorities: Tansu Ciller was prime
minister of Turkey in the 1990s, and Atifete Jahjaga was president of Kosovo
from 2011 to 2016.
By contrast, more than 80
percent of Romanians are Orthodox Christians, while fewer than 1 percent are
Muslims.
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“There will clearly be
part of the electorate that won’t like it,” Mr. Ivan said of the party’s choice
of Ms. Shhaideh. “They also won’t like that the two most powerful political
positions in Romania will be taken by those from ethnic and religious minorities.”
(Mr. Iohannis, the president, is Protestant and of German ancestry.)
Even so, Mr. Ivan said he
did not think Ms. Shhaideh’s faith would make her seem alien to fellow
Romanians. “Generally, Romania’s Muslim community, the Turks and Tatars, the
Islam they practice is a very moderate one,” he said. “They have lived more
than 100 years in a non-Muslim country, they’ve been through a socialist
regime. If you look at Shhaideh, her head isn’t covered.”
There appeared to be
little chance that the appointment of Ms. Shhaideh would soften Romania’s
position on migrant quotas. Romania was one of the European Union member
countries that initially opposed the setting of mandatory quotas for the
relocation of migrants, many of whom are from the Middle East or northern
Africa.
“Ironically, the fact
that she is a Muslim will prevent her from being too bold on areas like
refugees, simply because it is so easy to demonize and say, ‘Of course you say
that, you’re a Muslim,’ ” said Radu Magdin, brand ambassador of Smartlink
Communications, a political consulting group. “Her team will advise her not to
get involved in issues where things can become personal.”
Now that Ms. Shhaideh has
been nominated, the next step is for the president to formally designate her as
the next prime minister; that could happen this week. She would then need to be
confirmed in office by a vote of confidence in Parliament.
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