Election of the Day: Romania (parliamentary)

First, an update on last week. After the shocking result in which an unknown independent candidate, Calin Georgescu, pulled off a major upset and came in first with 23%, there has been a challenge to the Romanian Supreme Court about the integrity of the election. On Friday, they postponed their decision on that challenge until Monday. So today’s legislative election is taking place under a significant cloud of uncertainty. So today’s voters don’t know whether they’ll choose be choosing between a mainstreamish center-Right candidate and a conspiratorial tiktok Putinist for President next week or starting over with a new first round Presidential election the week after that.

One might think the likely impetus behind this challenge had to do with the first place candidate, but from what I can tell that doesn’t appear to be the case:

The court ruling itself on Monday will be based on a somewhat peculiar point. It is studying allegations that votes from one candidate, who dropped out a week before the election in support of Lasconi, were illegally transferred to her on election night. The court on Thursday ordered a check and recount of all ballots — nearly 9.5 million — and could decide to cancel the first round if it finds that the order of the candidates was influenced by fraud.

Given that Lasconi only beat the favorite and Social Democratic party leader Ciolacu by a couple thousand votes for second place, something like this may have been consequential. I have no idea how this “transfer” allegedly happened. We’ll find out tomorrow I suppose.

Voting in today’s legislative election will wrap up in a few hours. All 330 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 136 seats in the Senate are up. Seats are allocated by party list PR across 43 constituencies–Romania’s 41 counties, the municipality of Bucharest, and the diaspora. To be seated, a party list must cross either the 5% national threshold or the a 20% threshold in the relevant constituency, with higher thresholds for multiparty coalition lists and lower thresholds for parties representing ethnic minorities.

Polling, which we now have reason to take with a grain of salt after last week’s result, suggests that the Social Democrats are leading with around 30% (of course Ciolacu was polling similarly, and he couldn’t crack 20%). The reactionary right wight populist threat is primarily in the form of the Alliance of the Union of Romanians, who are one of three parties (along with a traditional center-right party currently in Government and a Lasconi’s reformist center-right party) vying for second place, although AUR actually held a narrow lead in the only poll of the last few weeks. AUR’s result in the first round of the presidential election was a disappointment, as their candidate came in 4th, but if the voters for Georgescu know what they’re doing, they should be supporting AUR or SOS Romania, a possibly even further right party hovering right around that 5% threshold in polling.

If I were looking for a way to be optimistic about this election, I might speculate that last week’s shocking result might motivate the apolitical but not insane demographic to turn out to vote in higher numbers today. Romania is generally a low-turnout country to there’s room for substantial movement on this front. That said, I’m not really feeling the optimism. The best case scenario is probably a continuation of the current coalition of the Social Democrats and the mainstream center right National party seems at least theoretically possible, although they’ll probably have to invite another coalition partner or two. The downside risk is of course substantial and terrifying.