Constitutional Court Ruling on Local Elections

Romanians are preparing for the local elections, which take place on the 5th of June in one round of voting.

Corina Cristea, 05.05.2016, 13:32

Two days before the start of the election campaign, the Constitutional Court debated on Wednesday the challenge of constitutionality in the case of two articles of the local election law. The first article refers to the use of the one-round system, while the second one concerns the minimum number of signatures required for independent runners to have their candidacy validated.

The two articles were challenged by journalist Liviu Avram, but the Constitutional Court dismissed them as ungrounded. The president of the Court Augustin Zegrean said that from the point of the view of the Court, there will only be one round of voting for the local elections, and that practice would not change from one day to the next, despite other similar cases being brought before the Court.

The Courts ruling has sparked a diverse response among the political class. The co-president of the National Liberal Party Alina Gorghiu believes two rounds are necessary to elect local officials, as has been the case in Romania from 1992 to 2012. She hopes that next week, when the Court will issue its judgment on the merits regarding the use of the one-round or the two-round voting system, which she says is necessary in order to respect the principles of democracy, it will rule that it is the majority who will decide the winner of the local elections.

The Social-Democrat vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies legal committee, Ciprian Nica, says that both the Social Democratic Party and the National Liberal Party stand to gain from the decision of the Constitutional Court with respect to maintaining the one-round system. In his opinion, rules should not change in the middle of a game. He said, however, that the Courts arguments could be taken into account in the future, if the law is to be amended at some point during the next Parliament term.

The co-president of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, Calin Popescu Tariceanu, shares the opinion that the voting system should not change one month before the elections, and that the next Parliament elected in autumn must re-discuss the way in which mayors are elected, given that the current law works to the disadvantage of smaller parties.

The decision of the Constitutional Court is welcome because election rules should not change during the election campaign, agrees Martin Arpad, an MP for the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania.