Romanian premier urges coalition unity

Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ciorbea told a news conference on Monday that the break-up of the coalition government would be "catastrophic" for the reform process and urged the governing parties to remain united, the Romanian news agency Rompres reported.

"The Christian Democrats, along their allies in the Romanian Democratic Convention, can accomplish, with some difficulty, the current reform in the country... The coalition' s break up would be catastrophic," Ciorbea - a leading member of the Christian Democratic National Peasant Party (PNTCD) - told reporters.

"We believe in the reform and will fulfil it at any rate, even by sacrificing the prime minister's popularity," Ciorbea said.

"We have to put stress on what binds us, not on what keeps us apart," he said, adding that the wrangling in the coalition was bad for the reform process.

A junior coalition party, the Democratic Party, has threatened to pull out of the year-old centrist coalition government unless major policy changes are introduced.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.