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| THE UNINOMINAL VOTING SYSTEM AND THE ELECTORAL REFORM 23/09/2008 |
| (2008-09-23) |
| Last updated: 2008-09-24 15:39 EET |
Following coordinated pressure from civil society, the electorate, the media and the President, the Romanian political class eventually swallowed the uninominal voting system, but doesn’t seem to have digested it yet. Since the fall of communism, Romanian voters have only chosen their representatives in Parliament based on party lists and the proportional voting system, so in the upcoming elections on November the 30th it will be for the first time that candidates will have to compete on their own, at least theoretically.
In practice, however, the old system is still in place, because parties will be able to win seats in Parliament based on the proportional distribution of votes nationwide. This means that candidate who have lost the election battle in their constituencies can still become senators and deputies, while representatives of parties that do not cross the electoral threshold will not make it to parliament even if, on their own, they won 50% plus 1 of the votes in their respective constituencies. Although everybody agrees that the election reform is only “half a step forward”, the parties have not yet come to terms with the idea of rejuvenating their ranks.
The populist Greater Romania Party, in opposition, has been the only party that has remained constant in its rejection of the uninominal law, which it even challenged before the Constitutional Court. A recent parliamentary flirt between the Greater Romania Party and the pro-presidential Liberal Democratic Party, also in opposition, was enough for the Liberal Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu to accuse them of creating a “coalition of shame” and trying to prevent the introduction of the uninominal voting system:
“A coalition of shame, because, while a whole country supports and promotes the uninominal voting system, these two parties have come together recently and, through obscure moves, have tried to block the uninominal voting which the Liberal Party has promoted in Parliament through an emergency ordinance.”
In his equally acid response, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, Emil Boc, described the Prime Minister’s attack as an “offensive of shamelessness”:
“In fact, the axis of evil against the uninominal is made up of the National Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party through the Greater Romania Party. The latter do their best to find arguments against the introduction of the uninominal voting system. The National Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party have created the uninominal constituencies, while Tariceanu himself has signed the government decision that allowed the Greater Romania Party to challenge this decision in court.”
Unbiased commentators tend to believe that in fact no politician would hate it if the uninominal were abolished, be it through an “offensive of shamelessness” or a “coalition of shame”.
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