President Iohannis: Parallel state - bad joke, made up by people who victimise themselves to seize power

The parallel state is "a bad joke", and a few people invent such concepts in order to seize all power, on Wednesday said President Klaus Iohannis in southeastern Ploiesti. 

"This thing with the parallel state is a rather bad joke and I hope Romanians understand there is no parallel state, however there are a few people who want to seize the entire power and in order to achieve that they victimise themselves and invent such concepts. There never was and there is no parallel state in Romania. It is a concept borrowed from countries with relatively undemocratic systems and there is no point in drawing parallels," Iohannis said after participating in a debate titled "Romania's cities 100 years on from the Great Union. A smart future for Ploiesti", organised at the local Oil and Gas University. 

Iohannis reiterated that people with criminal issues should not be at the state's helm. 

"You know very well how I see things and how I exposed them last year's autumn, when I said very clearly that it is wrong to have people with criminal issues leading the state because this is the result: they get there and want to protect their own skin and not the Romanian's skin and then such circus-like situations occur, when all grown-up people come and say out loud such nonsense as the parallel state thing, victimise themselves and so on and so forth, when their target is in fact to protect themselves," Iohannis affirmed. 

He explained that there are major differences between the approaches of the Power and the Opposition but these, however don't imply the existence of a parallel state. 

"There are indeed, several centres promoting different political concepts and if we think it through, we have political forces in power and political forces in the opposition. It is obvious that there are major approach differences between them but that doesn't mean we are dealing with a parallel state. We have divergent political approaches and as long as we have a live democracy in Romania, it sounds ok to me," the head of state completed.