Romania’s Parliament voted in a centrist government on Tuesday packed with young, Western-educated academics vowing to speed up reforms needed to bring the Balkan country into the European Union.

Forged from four centrist parties, Romania’s youngest post-communist cabinet faces two years of hard work to join the wealthy bloc along with Bulgaria in 2007 as planned. A joint session of both houses of parliament voted 265 for and 200 against Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu’s government, hailed by many Romanians as a new beginning 15 years after the fall of Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

Voters tired with poverty and corruption punished the outgoing ex-communist PSD for dragging its feet in pro-Western reforms. The young centrists must tackle a mountain of work in revamping rusty public administration and justice. “Our main mission is EU integration,” said Tariceanu, a successful businessman before turning to politics. “The government faces critical challenges, including endemic corruption, heavy taxation and poverty.”

Tariceanu’s alliance of Liberals and Democrats campaigned on a tough anti-graft ticket and vowed immediate pro-business reforms such as drastic tax cuts to undermine the black economy and boost foreign investment. “It’s the first time in 15 years that we have a prime minister who has made it in the real world and who has paid his taxes,” said political commentator Cornel Nistorescu. Tariceanu, 53, has made clear his first job will be to introduce as of Jan. 1, 2005, a 16 percent flat tax on income, now at 18-40 percent, and profit, now at 25 percent.

President tipped scales

Although the Nov. 28 election failed to produce a clear winner, centrist President Traian Basescu’s upset victory in the presidential race on Dec. 12 against the outgoing ex-communist PSD tipped the scales for the alliance. Tariceanu picked 36-year-old historian Razvan Ungureanu as his foreign minister, while economist and alliance spokesman Ionut Popescu, 40, will be finance minister in a cabinet largely welcomed by analysts as a clean break from the past.

The outgoing PSD was praised for its economic achievements but criticised for tolerating graft in its ranks and failing to protect human rights and press freedom. The centrists suffered an embarrassment earlier in the day when forced to change the proposed European Integration minister, Cristina Parvulescu, 29, after a press outcry over her credentials when she failed to pass a parliamentary committee.

Parvulescu, a Bucharest city hall director, was rejected by the foreign affairs committee because she did not show enough knowledge of the EU and she was slammed by media as being more of a sex symbol than a politician. Although the committee’s decision was only advisory, the alliance decide to replace Parvulescu with economics professor Emil Dinga, 48.

“It’s embarrassing, it’s their first setback,” said political analyst Sorin Ionita of the Romanian Academic Society. “But for sure this reaction, especially in the very macho Romanian press, has to do with the fact she is a young woman.” The mass daily Adevarul wrote on its front page that “the young blonde appeared in a short skirt at the hearing” and the daily National said the government’s youngest minister was “a very sexy feminine presence.” The new government will be sworn in by Basescu yesterday.

Dina KYRIAKIDO