Romania's Family and Youth Minister Gabriela Firea has resigned, the second member of Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu's leftist-led government to become a casualty of a national scandal over revelations about the abusive treatment of people interned in a complex of private retirement homes near Bucharest.
Firea announced her resignation in a Facebook post on July 14 after a private meeting with Ciolacu, who is also her Social Democratic Party (PSD) boss.
"I had a meeting with Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu several minutes ago and I handed in my resignation as minister for family, youth, and equality of chances," Firea wrote.
Firea's resignation came a day after Labor Minister Marius Budai left the government after it was revealed that he ignored an official warning from an NGO about the abuses perpetrated at three retirement homes operated in Voluntari, a small town on the outskirts of Bucharest, by an organization called St. Gabriel the Brave.
The organization's owner, Stefan Godei, was arrested by organized crime police after two Romanian investigative media outlets, Centrul de Investigatii Media (Investigative Media Center) and Buletin de Bucuresti (Bucharest Residence Permit), revealed earlier this year and police concluded this month that dozens of elderly and disabled people were being starved, beaten, drugged, tied to their beds, and denied basic hygiene in Godei's retirement homes.
Firea, a former PSD mayor of Bucharest, came under fire when documents published by the media showed that Godei had been her employee and occasional driver during her 2016-2020 mayoral stint. Furthermore, her husband, Florentin Pandele, has long been the PSD mayor of Voluntari.
Both Firea and Pandele have been vehemently denying any responsibility for the longtime abuses.
Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Firea repeatedly claimed she did not know Godei personally, while Pandele denied having any personal knowledge of the abuses although the neighbors of what has been dubbed "the houses of horror" lodged several complaints with the Voluntari town hall.
The scandal prompted a national outcry with increasing political ramifications, leaving newly appointed Ciolacu rushing to contain the political fallout for his party by ordering a sweeping nationwide investigation of all similar institutions.
More than 1,000 homes were raided by authorities, and 13 have been permanently closed while 43 were temporarily suspended.
Anti-organized-crime police detained 26 suspects, and four of them were subsequently arrested while 11 others were placed under house arrest.
For the past two years, PSD has been in an uneasy coalition with the center-right National Liberal Party (PNL) that saw Ciolacu taking the rotating helm of the government just weeks before the scandal broke out.
Ciolacu, who is the PSD leader, appears increasingly preoccupied by next year's parliamentary, local, and presidential elections.
What may be even more important for Ciolacu's political future is that Firea also gave up, "momentarily," as she put it, the leadership of the PSD branch in Bucharest, although she had been said to have her eyes set on another mayoral candidacy in the Romanian capital, or even a run for Romania's presidency -- two positions that Ciolacu might be interested in for himself, according to some reports.
In the meantime, as politicians are vying to make the most out of the crisis that incumbent President Klaus Iohannis has called "a national shame," the revelations about the treatment of the elderly and the disabled are sure to open an old wound in Romanian society more than three decades after horrific images from communist orphanages shocked the world.