The Romanian political scene is boiling
The current and the former governing parties in Romania continue to struggle to take center stage.
Bogdan Matei, 20.01.2020, 14:02
2019 was a rather atypical year for Romania, when the Socialist left lost the elections and the Liberal right won almost everything. A party that has been dominating the Romanian post-Communist scene for 30 years now, the Social Democratic Party — PSD was defeated by the National Liberal Party in the elections for the European Parliament of May 2019, when they obtained only half of the votes which they had got three years before, when they had returned to power.
The day after the elections, Liviu Dragnea, the strongman of the PSD and of the governing coalition made up of the PSD and ALDE — the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, was convicted and imprisoned for corruption. In September, ALDE went in opposition, and the government headed by the new Social Democratic leader, Viorica Dancila, became a minority government.
In October, Viorica Dancila and her team lost the executive power after Parliament passed a motion of no confidence tabled by the former Liberal opposition which is now governing the country. Running in the presidential election, the leftist leader Viorica Dancila was defeated in November, in the second round, by the acting president Klaus Iohannis who was supported by the Liberals.
According to a Social Democratic implacable tradition, all presidential candidates who lose the elections are removed from their positions, so Viorica Dancila, who got the poorest result ever registered by a leftist leader, was replaced by Marcel Ciolacu, the PSD’s spearhead, who also became speaker of the Chamber of Deputies.
The PSD hopes that Ciolacu will take the Social Democrats’ revenge. And their first target is the bill on the modification of the local elections law, for which the Liberal cabinet headed by Ludovic Orban will assume responsibility, as announced. Like many politicians and civil society representatives, the Liberal PM supports the election of mayors in two rounds of voting, a move meant to increase the mayors’ legitimacy.
The current system, according to which the winner is that candidate with the biggest number of votes won in the first round, led to strange situations, such as the one in Galati (southeastern Romania), the country’s biggest river port, where the current mayor was voted only by 9% of the electorate. The PSD blocked the respective bill in the special parliamentary committee and announced a motion a no confidence against the Orban cabinet.
Backed by the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania that wants to preserve its political monopoly over many localities in Transylvania (in central Romania), the motion is rejected by the Save Romania Union party, the People’s Movement Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats, whose members are in favor of two rounds of voting at the local elections.
If the motion of no confidence is adopted, the PSD wants the country to be ruled by a national union government until the parliamentary elections due in autumn. Commentators argue though that the toppling of the Orban government might accelerate the procedures for organizing early parliamentary elections. And this would be a first in 30 years, and according to voter surveys, the Liberals would win an outright victory. (translation by L. Simion)
