June 8, 2024 UPDATE
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Newsroom, 08.06.2024, 19:30
Elections – More than 40,000 employees of the Romanian Interior Ministry will be mobilized throughout the country to maintain order and public safety and to ensure protection measures at polling stations, on Sunday, when local and European Parliament elections are scheduled. According to the Interior Ministry, the electoral campaign took place under normal conditions, without serious events. The polling stations will open at 7:00 a.m. and close at 10:00 p.m. The presidents of the polling stations can decide to extend the vote until 23:59, if there are people who did not have the time to exercise this right, but are inside or in the immediate vicinity of the station. Approximately 19 million Romanians are called to the polls in the nearly 19,000 polling stations in the country. Abroad there will be 915 polling stations, twice as many as compared to the EP elections five years ago, most of them being opened in Italy, Spain and Great Britain. Romania will send 33 representatives to the EP. For the first time, the data on the voter turnout will be presented in real time, online, on the election day, for each separate election, on the website of the Permanent Electoral Authority. We remind you that this year the presidential election is scheduled in September and the legislative elections in December.
European elections – Tens of thousands of people demonstrated, on Saturday, in Germany, the day before the European elections, against the extreme right, AFP informs. ‘Germany is diverse!’, ‘Stop the hate!’, ‘Down with racism!’, were the slogans written on the placards of the demonstrators in Berlin. Demonstrations also took place in Stuttgart, Leipzig, Dresden, Munich, and Frankfurt. Despite the scandals that marked its campaign for the European Parliament, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) hopes to achieve its best performance in this election on Sunday. The elections for the 720 members of the European Parliament are already taking place in several states of the EU. In the Netherlands, the vote took place on Thursday, and in Ireland the electoral process took place on Friday. The Czech Republic voted on Friday and Saturday. Voters from Italy, Latvia, Malta and Slovakia also went to the polls. At the level of the European Union, more than 370 million voters are expected to go to the polls.
Weather – Areas in southern Romania, including the capital Bucharest, will come under a Code Orange alert for scorcher and severe thermal discomfort on Sunday, and the warning is valid until Tuesday morning. Particularly high temperatures will be recorded for this time of the year, with highs ranging between 35 and 37 degrees Celsius. The weather will be scorching which leads to a heightened thermal discomfort, and the temperature-humidity index (ITU) will exceed the critical threshold of 80 units. Meteorologists warn that temperatures will remain particularly high in the coming days, especially in the southern and southeastern regions. Also, the National Meteorological Administration issued for the same period a Code Yellow alert for thermal discomfort and high temperatures in the east, south-east, south-west and center. On Sunday, the sky will be variable, with temporarily heavy clouds, showers, electrical discharges and short-term intensification of the wind, in the northwest and center. There will be torrential rains, storms and hail. The maximum temperatures will generally range between 26 and 37 degrees C, and the minimum between 11 and 22 degrees C.
Denmark – Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen’s office said on Saturday that she suffered a slight cervical strain following an assault on Friday evening when a man punched her in a market in Copenhagen, Reuters reports. ‘Apart from this, the prime minister is fine, but she is shocked by the incident,’ the official statement said. After the incident, Frederiksen was taken to the hospital for a check-up. All the official events that the Danish PM was supposed to attend on Saturday have been cancelled. The attacker, a 39-year-old man, was detained. The incident took place two days before the Danes went to the polls in the European Parliament elections. Three weeks ago, the Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico was seriously injured in an assassination attempt. “I am shocked by the news of the attack on the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. Violence has no place in our societies”, the Romanian Prime Minister, Marcel Ciolacu, wrote on the X platform. (LS)
