Clotilde Armand

In the 2019 European elections, Armand was fourth on the USR-PLUS list (first woman) and she won a MP seat. Armand is one of only two women among the eight MP elected on the USR-PLUS list. She has since been on the Committee on Budgets.

Immediately after entering politics in 2016, Armand was accused that, in her capacity of director of Egis Romania, she personally profited from a motorway building contract gone awry between the Romanian state company CNAIR and Bechtel Corporation. Armand denies vigorously any involvement in the Bechtel affair. She responded that she started working for Egis only in September 2013, months after CNAIR's contract with Bechtel ended (in March 2013); that Egis verified the quality of the works of Bechtel, was not bound by contractual links to Bechtel, and defended the interests of its client CNAIR; that moreover she was not a stakeholder in Egis. In spite of her explanations, Armand is frequently depicted in some media venues as having "cashed 50M dollars from Bechtel". Her accusers include former Romanian MP Sebastian Ghiță, currently on Europol’s ‘Most Wanted’ list on corruption charges.

Armand says she does not believe in the left–right politics paradigm, arguing that, in Romania, the money wasted due to corruption is far higher than the differences between standard left and right policies. Nevertheless, she considers herself, within the French political context, a person that is naturally right-wing, but that Romania currently has many people who need the help of the state and that these people, who did not adapt to the changes and are no longer useful to society, should be re-integrated.

In 2002, Armand worked for Airbus in France and Germany, managing part of the A380 project management team. In 2005, she became IT Director of Distrigaz Sud, the Romanian branch of gas distribution giant GDF Suez, later moving to Paris as Innovation Director for GDF Suez Europe. Between September 2013 and March 2017, Armand was the head of the Romanian and Bulgarian branches of French engineering company Egis.

Clotilde Marie Brigitte Armand was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, France, where her father was undergoing alternative military service as a mathematics teacher. Her family was from Vichy, where she also attended primary and secondary school. She studied at the École Centrale Paris and then the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she met her future husband, Sergiu Moroianu, a Romanian mathematics researcher. She married Moroianu in 1997 and moved to Bucharest in 1999. In the following years, she lived some years in France and Germany, before settling back to Bucharest in 2003.

Armand argues that Romania needs a change of the political class. She wrote an open letter to President Klaus Iohannis in which she asked the two main parties of Romania (the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party, both of which have roots in the National Salvation Front) to apologize for their involvement in the June 1990 Mineriad and to remove former president Ion Iliescu and former Prime Minister Petre Roman from public life.

Clotilde Marie Brigitte Armand (born 28 June 1973) is a French-Romanian politician and businesswoman, currently serving as Member of the European Parliament. In the 2016 Romanian local elections she ran for Mayor of Bucharest's Sector 1 on behalf of Save Bucharest Union, a local party she had co-founded in 2015, eventually losing narrowly after having been announced as winner by the exit polls.