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| LOCAL ELECTIONS, RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS 17/06/2008 |
| (2008-06-17) |
| Last updated: 2008-06-19 15:09 EET |
As the second round of local elections in Romania winds down, parties are making tallies and negotiating. Applying different measurements, the main opposition parties, the pro-presidential Liberal-Democratic Party and the left wing Social-Democratic Party are each claiming victory. The Liberal Democrats are quoting the absolute vote counts in the elections to county councils, while the Social Democrats are quoting the number of county council president and mayor positions they won. In reply, the Liberal Democrats say they won most of the mayor’s seats in large county seat cities.
However, they lost the position of Bucharest mayor to an independent candidate that had left their own party, Sorin Oprescu. It should be recalled here that the Social Democratic party has never managed to put one of their own in the position of mayor of the capital city.
Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu’s own party, the National Liberal Party, came in third in the local elections, consolidating their position. Journalist Dan Tapalagă made an analysis of the reconfiguration of the political scene in Romania after the elections, emphasizing possible alliances being made:
“Both the Social Democrats and the Liberals said that the big losers were president Traian Basescu and the Liberal Democrats. I for one think that things are a bit more nuanced here, depending on the evaluation criteria; it really depends on what data we are using as reference. If the Liberal Democrats look at the polls, which were much more optimistic regarding their results, then of course they lost. If they look at figures from four years ago, then they have an obvious improvement. The same can be said about the Social Democrats: if they look at the polls, things are reversed, they won, because the polls anticipated a rather weak result for them, 22 to 24%. And the result they got is 28-29%. But if the same party, the Social-Democratic Party, looks at the figures from four years ago, then we see they have not gained much, quite the contrary, we can talk about a loss, all the more so as the Social- Democratic Party has been in opposition, a position in which parties usually gain. As for alliances, things are going into a pretty clear direction: isolating the Liberal Democratic Party and an agglutination of the Liberals, the Social Democrats, and the Conservatives”.
Speaking about the elections in Bucharest, political analyst Bogdan Chireac said that the election returns were a vote of censure for the entire political class, and that in the run up to the parliamentary elections due this autumn, that was a very big impulse for the political competition:
“The Social Democrats and the Liberal Democrats are now shoulder to shoulder – the Social Democrats are on an upward trend, and the Liberal Democrats have lost Bucharest. This will make this autumn’s campaign a very tough one. Furthermore, the loss of Bucharest makes for a personal defeat of President Traian Basescu. That should not be a sign for the other politicians to relax, because Traian Basescu fights best after taking a hit. What we have here, in practical terms, is a politician who, from now on, will use the entire range of tactics at his disposal to have his party take over power”.
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