Political Reconfigurations

Romania's main political parties have started preparations for the presidential election due this autumn.

Florentin Căpitănescu, 11.06.2014, 13:29

Ahead of this autumn’s presidential race, Romanian political parties try to secure the best position at the starting line. The first move came from the two main opposition parties, the right-of-centre Liberals and Liberal Democrats, which shortly after the EP election announced they would negotiate the terms of a merger. The goal is to challenge the primacy of the left-wing alliance made up of the Social Democratic Party, the National Union for the Progress of Romania and the Conservative Party, which is in power in Romania and won half of Romania’s seats in the European Parliament.

But the ruling coalition doesn’t seem willing to sit back and wait for the right wing to strengthen and ruin its plans for the presidential election. To prove that, the Social Democrat PM Victor Ponta announced last week that negotiations had been launched with the populist Party of the People, in opposition, on an arrangement that might entail changes not only in the local government structure, but in the Cabinet as well.

Victor Ponta: “We haven’t reached a conclusion yet, so we’ll talk about this when we have a result, probably next week. If anything needs changing in the government structure, we will discuss it together.”

In turn, the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, also in the ruling coalition, doesn’t see the Socialists’ move with a friendly eye. According to its leader Kelemen Hunor, inviting the Party of the People into the governmental team would severely affect the image of the current cabinet.

Kelemen Hunor: “This would be a terrible blow for the image of this cabinet. At local level, each party is free to make arrangements, but at a central government level, things are different. I think this would be a mistake.”

According to analysts, the ethnic Hungarians’ reluctance is not ungrounded. The Party of the People was founded by a former tabloid television owner, Dan Diaconescu, who managed to capitalise on his audience’s political frustration and to turn them into an electoral mass of manoeuvre. This is how, in the 2012 parliamentary election, the party scored a shocking 15%. Still, it has plummeted to 4% in the EP election last month, and many of its members elected into the Parliament of Romania have defected, joining the Social Democratic Party in power.