Sunday was parliamentary elections day in Romania. Few Romanians left their cosy apartments for a trip to the ballot box (a bit less than 40% of them , to be more precise), and there’s worrisome statistics indicating that only 15% of the voters had higher education. This year we’ve also had a new voting system – a mixed member proportional representation, supported by a fairly large majority of the political spectrum (the liberals and the social-democrats), and opposed by the President’s party. As any proportional system, there were quite a few dissatisfactions with the way mandates were redistributed, but overall the system seems to have achieved its purpose.
The social democrats scored 33.6%, the democrats (allegedly a right-wing party, though their political programme seems to be the opposite) 33%, and the liberals 18.7%. The new voting system – with a 5% electoral threshold – eliminated extremist parties from the Parliament, which is great news. However, Sunday’s results leave us with a huge dilemma, as we do not know who will form the Government. Most probably, intense political negotiations will last till the end of December and our President will definitely take advantage of our semipresidential political system to veto plenty of government formulas that don’t suit him.
Unfortunately, the end of the year also reminds us we’ve done too little to curb corruption (one of the elected MPs this Sunday is actually in detention for fraud) and to absorb European structural and cohesion funds properly. With political strife prevailing over efficient administration, there are chances we will end up in the same situation of aid freezing as our Bulgarian neighbours…