Czechs and Slovaks in Romania are represented in parliament by a man sentenced to one and a half years in prison with a suspension, regional news portal Bihoreanul writes .
Adrian Miroslav Merka is a Romanian politician, and representative of the Slovak minority and the Czech minority in the Chamber of Deputies. He was elected to the 2004, 2008 and 2012 legislative elections and was re-elected following the 2020 parliamentary elections.
Adrian Merka represents, according to the last census, 17,199 Slovaks (0.1% of the country’s population). Merka was banned for another three years from holding the position of deputy, after in 2015 the High Court of Cassation and Justice sentenced him to one and a half years in prison with suspension. Prosecutors accused him of conflict of interest after he hired both parents at his parliamentary office.
Merka said that he ran in the Dec. 6 parliamentary elections for the fourth term “at the proposal of UDSCR [Democratic Union of Slvaks and Czechs in Romania], given that Bihor has the largest Slovak community in the country.”
In the Romanian Parliament, more than a dozen ethnic minorities have MPs representing them in the lower house, and since 1990, have had representatives of their respective minorities not elected by popular vote, but delegated by their minority organizations. Currently, there are 18 in the Chamber of Representatives. The only exception is the Hungarian minority, which — on the power of its own minority voters — has had an uninterrupted presence in both houses of parliament since the 1990 regime change.
The 44-year-old Merka has three degrees: he graduated from the Nagyvárad (Oradea in Romanian) University as a sports teacher, as a mechanical engineer at the same university and also holds a degree in law from the Bucharest Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University. He also has a masters degree in educational management.
Title image: Adrian Miroslav Merka. (source: bihoreanul.ro)
