President Nicusor Dan, attending on Sunday the event launching USR deputy Catalin Drula's candidacy for Bucharest Mayor, said that the last few years of Bucharest's history can be defined as 'the long struggle between infrastructure and pansies.'

'I was thinking about how we could define these years in the history of Bucharest, to frame this period as the clash between corruption and anti-corruption would mean to oversimplify, and this actually goes for the entire country. I think the definition would be the long struggle between infrastructure and pansies, because this city has a huge deficit of infrastructure and, unfortunately, we've had this political tension in the last 20-30 years that has caused many of this city's resources to be spent on all sorts of nonsense, some of it very shiny, but it has not brought us to the infrastructure this city really needs, and this is also visible in the relationship with other large cities in Romania,' Nicusor Dan said.

He recalled how he managed to organize last year's referendum for the capital city and thanked Catalin Drula for translating the question regarding the City Hall's budget into a bill.

'Last year at this time (...) we managed to organize a referendum for Bucharest. We were campaigning for this referendum and the people's vote spoke volumes. We had three questions. One about drugs, how can the City Hall fight this scourge and what are the City Hall's responsibilities in this fight with a threat that affects and scares many families in this city. And, of course, to do this, you need money. So we go back to question No. 1. How should the money the working people of Bucharest take out of their pockets be divided so that the city can finally develop and enter the global competition that it is bound to conduct properly? I thank Catalin Drula for transposing this first question and the first answer of the Bucharesters into a bill that I hope we will see approved by Parliament,' the president said.

Nicusor Dan also described as 'absurd' the fact that Bucharest would fail, for lack of money, to unify public heat distribution corporation RADET with electricity and heat producer ELCEN.

'It is absurd for this city, the capital of Romania, with such an important contribution to the GDP, to have failed in all these years due to lack of money, to unify RADET with ELCEN, just because the money went to pansies and curbs. It is absurd that we do not have the metro integrated into Bucharest's public transport network. The mayor of Bucharest, when they are lucky to have a good minister to work with, things unfold in coordination, when they have the misfortune to work with a minister who fails to deliver, this is no longer possible and, of course, there are many other issues to the infrastructure of Bucharest,' the president emphasized.

Referring to the question related to urban planning, he said that urban development must be done by putting the resident first.

'Again, this was a very important question, because we had a mayor who corrected certain things regarding urban development, but this on just 7% of the city's territory, because for the rest we had a sector-specific urban development or, to put it bluntly, the development of Bucharest's sectors was in the hands of the real estate mafia. That's what happened, and that's why it's important that what the people of Bucharest said is translated into reality. From the level of the Capital's City Hall, urban development should be done as the science called urbanism has been making it clear for about 100 years now - essentially, by putting the resident first,' Nicusor Dan pointed out. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Mihai Stoica; EN - writing by: Simona Klodnischi)