Bogdan Pintilie announces resignation from PNL after controversial posting

Bogdan Pintilie announced that he was resigning from the National Liberal Party (PNL) after reactions to his online post showing a doctored photo of Brasov Deputy Mayor Flavia Boghiu, Agerpres reports.

"I want to publicly apologise to Ms Flavia Boghiu for yesterday's post, a post I deleted also yesterday. I also want to apologise to all the ladies who have been victims of violence of any kind and who might have seen my post. Although the picture does not belong to me and I wrote in the text of the post that it is a pamphlet, I regret that it was misinterpreted and that I touched on such a sensitive subject that many women face. Since the subject was politically exploited, I decided to resign from PNL pending further clarifications," Pintilie wrote on Facebook.

Brasov Mayor Allen Coliban of the Save Romania Union (USR) on Sunday accused a local leader of the National Liberal Youth (TNL) of threatening Deputy Mayor Flavia Boghiu in a Facebook post.

The post on the account of Liberal Bogdan Pintilie, to which the mayor refers, also includes a fake photo showing Deputy Mayor Flavia Boghiu with a bruised eye.

Boghiu also had a reaction to that post.

"The vice-president of the Liberal Youth, Bogdan Pintilie, thinks that I would look great when battered, with a bruised eye. The real estate developer Garbis-Vincentiu Kehaiyan, who wants to build the American Dream project on the hills of Schei, would like to see me in a wheelchair, would like to happen in Brasov what happened at Mogosoaia, where a fellow local councilor was threatened and assaulted. (...) No woman should worry about her own safety just because she has upset someone's interests. I am sure that such cases are happening all over Romania. I think the time has come for us not to keep silent and to pretend it's business as usual, and to send a clear message to all women who go through this: You are not alone! And for those who lack respect for women and the fear of the law, let us show them that such behaviours are unacceptable," reads Boghiu's Facebook post.

Pintilie explained on his Facebook page that he used a photo taken "from a/some journalist(s) in Brasov," but the text that accompanies it belongs to him; it was a joke and "it has nothing to do with domestic violence or physical aggression."

USR national leader Dacian Ciolos has warned that "the trivialisation of violence and increased aggression in Romanian politics will soon translate into acts of aggression" and called on the PNL leadership to "take extraordinary and swift action" in the Brasov case.

PNL national chairman Florin Citu says that he will not tolerate any form of incitement to violence, adding that the PNL Brasov chapter will deal with the exclusion of the National Liberal Youth (TNL) representative who had such a "slippage."