Ludovic Orban

Ludovic Orban (; born 25 May 1963) is a Romanian engineer and politician who served as the Prime Minister of Romania from November 2019 to December 2020. He was president of the National Liberal Party (PNL) between 2017 and 2021, which expelled him shortly after he lost a bid for another term as its leader. He also served as Minister of Transport from April 2007 to December 2008 in the Tăriceanu II Cabinet. From 2008 to 2016, he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Bucharest. He resumed his parliamentary seat within the Chamber of Deputies after the 2020 Romanian legislative election; shortly thereafter, he was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies of Romania. He resigned from this position in October 2021. Two months later, he founded a new centre-right political party, the Force of the Right (FD). Biography Early life and career Orban was born in the Transylvanian city of Brașov to an ethnic Hungarian father and an ethnic Romanian mother. He was baptized and confirmed into his father’s Unitarian Church of Transylvania, and speaks Hungarian at a basic level. Between 1948 and 1956, under the early communist regime, the elder Orban was an agent of the Securitate secret police. Orban completed secondary studies at the city's Andrei Șaguna High School in 1982. He then studied industrial machinery design technology at the University of Brașov, graduating in 1988. In 1993, he completed post-graduate studies in Political Science at the National School of Administration and Political Science of Bucharest.