Leaders of the opposition National Liberal Party, PNL, and the Democratic Liberal Party, PDL, have pledged to hold a joint congress on July 26 at which their planned merger will be approved.

“It will be a novelty for Romanian politics, with two equally sized parties joining forces in order to create a rightist party capable of taking on Victor Ponta’s ruling centre-left coalition,” Gheorghe Flutur, the PDL vice-president, said on Thursday.

“Our merger will be officialised by the end of this month, during the congress,” he added.

The new party will be named the National Liberal Party, Flutur explained.

A consensus candidate of the centre-right for the next presidential elections is to be nominated in early August.

Klaus Iohannis, who on June 29 was elected as the PNL’s new head, is seen as the favourite. Iohannis, 55, an ethnic German, is the popular mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu.

The presidential elections are important for Romania, as the head of state has to right to nominate the Prime Minister, the chiefs of the intelligence services and the heads of anti-corruption bodies.

The centre-left ruling coalition is confident that it will win the presidential election, judging by its performance in the European parliamentary elections in May, when it won around 38 per cent of the votes.

The governing alliance comprising the Social Democratic Party, PSD, and two minor parties also has a clear majority in the Parliament.

Opposition parties, however, are trying to challenge the dominance of Ponta and the PSD over Romanian politics.