BUCHAREST — Just don’t call him Kaczyński.

Liviu Dragnea, president of Romania's ruling Social Democrats (PSD), may be running the country without being prime minister, like Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński. And fears are rising at home and in Brussels that he is steering his country in the same "illiberal" direction as Poland and Viktor Orbán's Hungary.

The man himself dismisses talk of any similarity with the Polish Law and Justice party (PiS) leader, saying in an interview with POLITICO: “I don’t know Mr. Kaczyński, so I don’t know if there’s any resemblance between us. I’m myself, just like every political leader is his own man."

Whether Dragnea will truly become Brussels’ next illiberal migraine will depend a lot on how events unfold in the coming weeks. Since leading his party to a 45 percent victory in a parliamentary election in 2016, Dragnea has forced the resignation of two prime ministers, pushed forward a controversial overhaul of the justice system and infuriated other Romanian politicians by suggesting the country follow the lead of U.S. President Donald Trump in Israel and move its embassy to Jerusalem.

Dragnea — who has been barred from serving as prime minister because of a suspended jail sentence for an attempt to rig a referendum in 2012 — received a 3-1/2 year jail sentence from the High Court on June 21st in a case involving fake jobs for party workers, though he was expected to appeal.

"You can all become targets of this repulsive system" — Liviu Dragnea to PSD rally

Ahead of that High Court ruling, Dragnea ramped up tensions. At the end of May, the Constitutional Court ruled in favor of an effort by the PSD government to fire the country's top anti-corruption prosecutor, Laura Codruta Kövesi. Dragnea has threatened to impeach Romanian President Klaus Iohannis if he doesn't proceed with the dismissal.

“The potential [for Romania to take an illiberal turn] is there,” said Paul Ivan, senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center. “There are elements that point in that direction.”

At a recent PSD rally, Dragnea accused what he calls “the parallel state” — which he defines as a conspiracy by the intelligence services, police officers, customs officials, financial authorities, prosecutors and judges — of trying to take the PSD government down.

“Don’t think that only dignitaries are targets,” he told the crowd. "You can all become targets of this repulsive system,” he said. In response, the crowd cheered: “Liviu Dragnea don’t give up, we are on your side!”

Romania’s foreign partners — including NATO and the EU — encouraged and “partially financed this parallel state and this repulsive system,” Dragnea said in a television interview the next day.

Beer and sausages

Gray-haired, 55 years old, with a dapper moustache, Dragnea presides over the lower chamber of the Romanian parliament from an imposing office in the building erected by the late dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu.

Unlike some of his predecessors at the head of the PSD, who sometimes used elevated rhetoric to convey their messages, Dragnea presents himself as a man of the people, speaking a language easily understood by the PSD base in Romania’s rural areas.

In May, he responded to a challenge from a follower on his Facebook page to post a picture proving he was really the one writing his posts. “If the one croaking here is the moustache man, I offer a beer crate,” Bogdan Lungu, from the eastern city of Galați, wrote on Dragnea’s Facebook page. “Bro, take a selfie and spite me.”

Dragnea responded with a selfie, asking for the beer crate.

A week later, Lungu came to Bucharest, bought the crate and went to meet Dragnea at the PSD headquarters. In return Dragnea offered traditional Romanian sausages.

Though his conviction prevents him from being prime minister, Dragnea remains the most powerful politician in the country.

Dragnea, whose office is adorned with Orthodox icons and paintings of rural Romania, told POLITICO that one of the things he was proud of was never having been a member of the Communist Party — even if most Romanians were obliged to under Ceaușescu. “Some of us were crazier and didn’t want to,” he said.

Before the 1989 revolution, he studied transport engineering in Bucharest. In the early '90s, he got into business by starting a bar in a village. “I took my fate in my own hands,” he said. “I was very young, 20-something.” By 1996, he was running different businesses, including a hotel in a small town in southern Romania, and employing nearly 1,000 people.

One day, as he was pushing his daughter in a stroller heading to the hotel, he noticed how hard she was shaking because the sidewalk was broken. “I took her in my arms and told myself that it was impossible that we couldn’t find someone to make that town cleaner and better administered,” he recalled. That was the moment he decided to entered politics, he said. Soon, he was running his home county of Teleorman, in southern Romania.

From 2012 to 2015, Dragnea served as minister for regional development and public administration under then-Prime Minister Victor Ponta.

Ponta was forced out by street protests over a deadly nightclub fire in Bucharest, and Dragnea, who had become the leader of the Social Democrats just before Ponta's resignation, led the party to victory in the parliamentary election the following year.

Though his conviction prevents him from being prime minister, Dragnea remains the most powerful politician in the country. At the PSD congress in March, he got standing applause and a loud “yes” when he asked members from the stage if they wanted him to continue as the party's president. Applauding from the first row, where she was seated alongside leading PSD figures, was Dragnea’s 25-year-old fiancée, whom, according to Romanian media reports, he met while she was his assistant.

Rule of law

Dragnea’s legal troubles date back to his time as a regional county leader. The High Court found him guilty of pressuring the local director of social services to put two people working for the PSD on her payroll and handed down a jail sentence, which is pending appeal. In another case, Dragnea is accused of having fraudulently obtained national and EU public money while he was the president of the county council.

Dragnea protests his innocence, but said he prefers not to comment on specifics to not prejudice the cases.

Romanian opposition and civil society groups say Dragnea’s problems with the law are behind a controversial overhaul of the legal system they say will undermine the independence of the judiciary and hinder the fight against corruption.

The reforms include changes to the retirement age and measures that would increase the time it takes for young judges and prosecutors to rise in the hierarchy. This could shrink the workforce, creating backlogs in the judicial system, according to the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption body GRECO.

"We want every citizen in Romania to have a fair trial, and the right to defense and presumption of innocence to be guaranteed" — Liviu Dragnea

One amendment, passed on Monday by the lower parliament chamber, to an overhaul of the Romania's criminal law could lift the ban on Dragnea serving as prime minister. It would require retrials for cases in which not all judges signed off on the sentence. One of the judges in Dragnea’s case retired before the ruling was decided, according to Romanian media reports.

Dan Barna, the president of the Save Romania Union, the second-largest opposition party, said that while “Orbán and Kaczyński promote anti-liberal policies to consolidate their power, in the case of Liviu Dragnea — who also uses populist, anti-EU rhetoric — the reason is much more insipid: He wants to avoid going to prison."

"No one in the EU goes for a photo op with him, because they see him as a person with a jail sentence,” Barna added.

The PSD's changes to the legal system could put Romania on a collision course with Brussels, said Otilia Dhand, senior vice president for Central & Eastern Europe at Teneo Intelligence, a political risk consultancy.

The European Commission has expressed worries that Romania is backsliding in its fight against corruption.

Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, who has been forefront in the standoff with Poland over rule-of-law concerns, urged Romania not to reverse years of progress against corruption when he visited Bucharest in March.

"Don’t stop, don’t stand still, and for heaven’s sake, certainly don’t run in the other direction," he said.

Timmermans also stressed the importance of independent courts, adding that Brussels believes "there's nothing wrong with the judiciary."

In his interview with POLITICO, Dragnea dismissed concerns that the overhaul was being done for his benefit.

“We’re interested in people’s fundamental rights and liberties being respected," he said. "We want every citizen in Romania to have a fair trial, and the right to defense and presumption of innocence to be guaranteed.”

Recent disclosure of agreements between Romania’s intelligence services and anti-corruption prosecutors and judges on gathering evidence have thrown doubt onto some cases, he suggested.

‘Window of opportunity’

Dragnea said that there was no cause for Brussels to be concerned. “Under the PSD, Romania strongly respects European principles, follows the European interests, but — like any EU country — thinks about its own interests as part of the common interest.”

After more than a decade of EU membership, Romania doesn't think like a candidate country anymore, he said, and shouldn't be treated as one. It is now "a country becoming aware of its rights, which wants to be involved in the decision-making and to enjoy all the benefits of a member state, while respecting EU rules."

“I think the EU is better off having a direct but honest and predictable partner than a mute and frustrated partner" — Liviu Dragnea

He said his party had had to swap out two prime ministers because of the pace of implementing the government program, which he said must be “infernal” because that’s the only way Romania can seize on a “window of opportunity” to enter a strategic development stage.

Dragnea said he didn't mind not being prime minister and said claims that Prime Minister Viorica Dăncilă is his puppet were highly offensive. “I generally don’t have any frustrations,” he said. “I live in reality.”

Romania is growing rapidly (GDP growth neared 7 percent in 2017) — even if the Commission has warned that the budget deficit would increase significantly, mostly due to increases in public sector wages. Brussels said in May that Romania and Hungary have failed to follow recommendations on fiscal policy that would keep them within the EU’s fiscal rules.

Next year, the country will elect a new president, an office for which Dragnea is eligible. He said his party would decide whom to put forward next year. In the meantime, the focus should be on what Romanians expect: new highways, a better health care system, and higher salaries and pensions, he said.

As for Romania's relationship with the EU, Dragnea said the country deserves more respect as it prepares to take over the Council presidency for the first time in 2019: “I don’t think it’s exaggerated for us to want Romania to become an important voice, to be a respected partner, at least to the extent that we show respect.”

“I think the EU is better off having a direct but honest and predictable partner than a mute and frustrated partner,” he said.

This story has been updated to include a June 21st court verdict.