Diana Iovanovici Șoșoacă

Diana Iovanovici Șoșoacă (born 13 November 1975[2] in Bucharest, Romania[3]) is a Romanian lawyer and far-right[4][5] politician. She gained notorious popularity in 2020 after she published several messages against COVID-19 restriction measures on social media sites such as Facebook.[3][6][7] Iovanovici Șoșoacă is a former member of the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) and part of the Senate of Romania for the Iași County since 21 December 2020.[2][8] She later said that she did not want to enter the Parliament of Romania but that she was forced by other people who pressured her.[9] On 10 February 2021, she was excluded from AUR's parliamentary group after Claudiu Târziu and Sorin Lavric (the party leaders) proposed her exclusion for not following the party's strategy.[10] Șoșoacă is one of the main anti-vaccine figures of the COVID-19 pandemic in Romania.[11][12] She also supports a Romanian withdrawal from the EU[13] and holds an anti-immigration rhetoric centered on the Syrian-born Romanian physician Raed Arafat.[14][15]

On 12 December 2021, Șoșoacă was accused by the Italian television channel Rai 1 of having kidnapped the well-known journalist Lucia Goracci following an interview that included some questions about the COVID-19 pandemic that she considered uncomfortable. The journalist was later arrested under false accusations of theft and trespassing made by the senator towards her, and she was released only following the intervention of the Italian embassy in Romania.[16]

Șoșoacă has also been recurrently criticized in Romanian media for her ties with Russia.[17][18][19] The Russian state-controlled Sputnik news agency labeled her "the politician of the year 2021 in Romania".[20][21]