BUCHAREST — Romania’s President Klaus Iohannis rejected on Tuesday, December 27, a proposal by the election-winning leftist party to name the EU country’s first female and first Muslim prime minister.

“I have carefully weighed the pro and con arguments and I have decided not to appoint Sevil Shhaideh,” Iohannis told reporters, Reuters reported.

“As a result, I am asking the Social Democrat Party’s (PSD) and ALDE to make a new proposal.”

The name of Shhaideh, a 52-year-old Muslim woman who is a close associate of PSD power broker Liviu Dragnea, was proposed late last week by the leftist PSD.

The PSD won the Dec. 11 general election by a wide margin and, with its junior coalition partner and long-time ally ALDE, has an outright majority in parliament of 250 members in the 465-seat, two-house assembly and will easily be able to get parliamentary approval for its government.

Shhaideh is from Romania’s small and long-established Turkish minority, but her Muslim faith is not thought to have been a problem for Iohannis.

Instead, the focus and concern might have been on her Syrian husband, whom she married in 2011.

According to non-profit investigative journalism group the Rise Project, he has several times expressed his support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and for Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah.

“Either there were national security reasons to reject her, as she is married to a Syrian citizen which may put security at risk, or there were purely political reasons,” political commentator Mircea Marian told Reuters

“The PSD has lost a lot by making this proposal, which came as a surprise to their hard core electorate.”

On the other hand, the leader of the PSD, Dragnea, had withdrawn his own bid to become prime minister because he is serving a two-year suspended sentence for fraud in a previous election.