Romanian candidates for the European elections

Wednesday, March 26th, was the national deadline for the submission of lists of candidates for the European legislative elections. Decisions can be contested as of Thursday and results are to be made public on April 16th at the latest. All Romanian parliamentary parties submitted, as expected, their lists of candidates willing to take over the 32 seats of MEP that Romania is entitled to.

Bogdan Matei, 27.03.2014, 13:09

The leftist ruling alliance made up of the Social Democratic Party, the National Union for the Progress of Romania and the Conservative Party, their government partners, the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania and the opposition National Liberal Party and the Liberal Democratic Party have put on their candidate lists people who have lived up to the party leaders’ expectations.

Therefore, it is very likely that Social Democrats Corina Cretu and Catalin Ivan, the Liberals Norica Nicolai and Adina Valean, the Liberal Democrat Theodor Stolojan and the representative of the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, Iuliu Winkler, should be part of the next European Parliament as well. For the first time part of Romania’s Parliament, the Dan Diaconescu Party of the People opens its candidate list with its controversial founder, the former TV host Dan Diaconescu.

There are also several non-parliamentary parties whose representatives will run in these elections. Among them is the rightist Christian Democratic National Peasant Party, the main political force of a government coalition formed in the late 1990s, alongside the newly set up People’s Movement Party, the New Republic Party and the Civic Force Party, all of them supported by President Traian Basescu. Leftist non-parliamentary parties, such as the Socialist Alliance, the Social Justice Party and the Ecologist Party have their own candidates for the upcoming European elections.

The National Farmers’ Association, also an independent group, has high hopes pinned on the upcoming elections. The nationalist and populist Greater Romania Party, once the second political force in Romania, continues to have many fans, although it did not make it to Romania’s Parliament. The head of this party, the former mayor of the city of Cluj-Napoca, Gheorghe Funar is currently at loggerheads with the party’s founder Corneliu Vadim Tudor, the veteran of countless political campaigns. For this reason they have both submitted separate candidate lists, under the umbrella of the same party.

It is up to the Central Election Bureau to select the list Romanians can chose their European representatives from. Just like independent parties, there are also independent candidates. Gymnast Corina Ungureanu, a former world champion, is one of them. A popular actor in Romania, the former liberal minister of culture Mircea Diaconu submitted his candidacy as independent, but his efforts might be in vain, as the National Integrity Agency has found him incompatible, which means he does not have the right to occupy a public position until 2015.