Mircea Coșea

Dumitru Gheorghe Mircea Coșea (9 June 1942 – 18 December 2025) was a Romanian politician, economist, diplomat, essayist, journalist and academic. A former member of the Party of Social Democracy (PDSR) until June 1997, he joined Teodor Meleșcanu and Iosif Boda in creating the short-lived Alliance for Romania (Alianța pentru România, ApR) party, which merged into the National Liberal Party (PNL) in 2002. In 1999, Coșea was among the members of Varujan Vosganian's grouping, the Union of Right-wing Forces (Uniunea Forțelor de Dreapta, UFD), which also joined the PNL.

Coșea was a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Constanța County in 1996–2000 (with the PDSR group in 1996–1997, as an independent in 1997–2000) and for Olt County, with the Justice and Truth alliance group, from 2004. With the accession of Romania to the European Union on 1 January 2007, became a Member of the European Parliament with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. In March 2007, he resigned from the PNL and, as an independent MEP, joined the Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty (ITS) group inside the European Parliament.

He was a professor at the Faculty of General Economics, part of the Academy of Economic Studies (ASE), and at the Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University (UCDC), being head of the UCDC's Department of European Integration. He was also a regular contributor to Săptămâna Financiară.

Life and career Born in Ploiești, Coșea graduated from the ASE in 1965, and furthered his studies at the Istituto di Studi per lo Sviluppo Economico in Italy, and later took his Ph.D. Between 1967 and the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he was a simple member of the Romanian Communist Party. After winning a competition for the office, he represented Communist Romania at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in Geneva between 1973 and 1980. Although the measure was initially received with interest, the program was ultimately unsuccessful and most businesses up for privatization did not attract investors' attention Coșea attributed this negative phenomenon to the underdevelopment of the local capital market, He rejected the verdict entirely, stressing that it contradicted the fact that he had worked abroad during much of the period. According to his version, the Securitate's Espionage Department (Direcția de Informații Externe, DIE) had repeatedly tried to recruit him during his stay in Switzerland. On 25 January 2007, the CNSAS took a second vote on the matter of his past activities, and established that he had been responsible for political policing, causing Coșea to file a complaint.

He ultimately resigned from the PNL on 14 March 2007, indicating that he had felt marginalized inside its group of MEPs. Despite this move, Coșea denied that he had plans to join the other Romanian Identity, Tradition, Sovereignty members inside the Greater Romania Party.

Selected works Economie - manual pentru învățământul liceal ("Economics - Textbook for High School Teaching"), Editura Didactică și Pedagogică, 1994 Jurnal în tranziție ("Diary of the Transition"), Editura Expert, Bucharest, 1995 with Silviu Cerna, Lucian Croitoru, Ion Davidovici, and Daniel Dăianu: Oeconomica, Editura Rosetti, Bucharest, 2005