For a man facing potential jail time, Victor Ponta seems at ease.

Then again, the 45-year-old former Romanian prime minister is used to setbacks: When a fire killed 60 people at a Bucharest nightclub in 2015 and thousands of people took to the streets to protest lax safety standards, somebody's head had to roll.

"That emotion and collective anger needed a lightning rod. And that could only have been me," said Ponta, who quickly stepped down. "This is what being a politician means — you are accountable for things you don’t do directly, just like you benefit from things you don’t do directly."

After a bid for the Romanian presidency in 2014 and being booted out of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD) last year for defying the party to back short-lived Prime Minister Sorin Grindeanu, Ponta is now building a party of his own, inspired by Emmanuel Macron's En Marche.

"He [the French president] comes with a vision that is not only against something, but with how he wants to change France and Europe. I believe that Romania needs something like that too," Ponta, who is still a member of parliament, told POLITICO.

“I defended myself in court. I haven’t talked about this in public as I didn’t want to be judged on TV, but in court. I will accept the decision, whether I like it or not” — Former Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta

Pro Romania, the party he founded this year with Daniel Constantin, a former vice president of the PSD's junior coalition partner ALDE, is designed to fill a vacuum in Romania for "a huge pro-European, progressive, social-liberal" segment of society that feels neglected by the Social Democrats and let down by the weakened opposition National Liberal Party (PNL), Ponta said.

"Either we will follow Italy’s model and there will be political parties appearing with a radical, populist message, but in the end without solutions; or new parties are built that come with a pragmatic message, with solutions, and which take responsibility for implementing their message," Ponta said.

For political analyst and former Ponta adviser Radu Magdin, Pro Romania could find a niche if it can strike a balance between patriotism and openness to the outside world. Already, Ponta is emerging as the main counterweight to PSD party strongman Liviu Dragnea, said Magdin.

"The polarization between the two helps Ponta," he said. Ponta's challenge will be to win financial backing from the private sector and woo the public, in a shifting political landscape that Magdin described as "a negative referendum on Dragnea and who will replace him."

In the dock

A more immediate challenge is his sentencing on March 20 on charges of forgery, complicity to tax evasion and money laundering dating back to his time as a lawyer in 2007-2008. The National Anticorruption Directorate (DNA) requested a jail sentence last month; Ponta denies the charges, which he says are not related to his political activity, but declined to go into the details of the case.

"I defended myself in court. I haven’t talked about this in public as I didn’t want to be judged on TV, but in court. I will accept the decision, whether I like it or not," said Ponta, who as prime minister proposed current chief DNA prosecutor Laura Codruța Kövesi (who was named by POLITICO as one of 28 individuals who would have a major impact on Europe in 2015) for the job. Current Justice Minister Tudorel Toader wants her out, saying she has overstepped the mark and doesn't respect parliament's authority.

Ponta defended the DNA's mission to investigate Romania's endemic high-level corruption, but feels its powers need fine-tuning to avoid abuse: He cites the anticorruption office's investigation of his former deputy prime minister, Gabriel Oprea, over a road accident in 2015 that led to the death of a policeman in his motorcade. The DNA said Oprea should not have had a police escort as he wasn't on official business.

The former prime minister spoke to POLITICO during a visit to Brussels to prepare for the March 22 conference of the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe, where he is due to speak. (If sentenced to prison, he intends to appeal.) Ponta was coy about whether his presence at the pre-EU summit conference of a pan-European party whose MEPs include members of Britain's ruling Conservatives and Poland's governing Law and Justice party means he hopes to join them.

However, Ponta does want his new party to run for the European Parliament election in 2019. Once it has defined its ideology and worked out how best it can contribute to Romanian politics, it can turn to thinking about "the vision of Europe we find ourselves in."

The former prime minister believes the established center-right and center-left parties, such as the Social Democrats he used to represent, have run out of energy and can no longer deliver a vision for a more efficient, reformed European Union.

"So the first thing is to accept that a cycle has ended and that if Europe is not reformed in the next legislature, we will have more and more anti-European votes and more rebels like Poland, Hungary and more recently Romania," he said.