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| EUROPEAN ELECTIONS IN ROMANIA 09/06/2009 |
| (2009-06-09) |
| Last updated: 2009-06-10 14:39 EET |
In terms of procedure, the final results of the Euro-elections in Romania will most likely be validated and made public in the Official Journal on Thursday, after the Central Election Bureau has looked into and solved all complaints. From a political point of view however, neither the parties' classification, nor their results can undergo any major changes. Part of the ruling coalition, the leftist alliance made up of the Social Democratic Party and the Conservative Party, with 31% of the votes, and the pro-presidential Liberal Democratic Party with 29% of the votes, scored the best results.
The opposition, represented by the National Liberal Party, that got 14% of votes and the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania with only 8 percent, did not manage to win more than a quarter of the total votes. Among the parties that have not reached the electoral ceiling of 5% are the non-parliamentay Christian and Democratic Peasant Party, the independent Pavel Abraham and the newly established Civic Force.
Their failure has been forecast by all pre-electoral polls. The Greater Romania Party scored an unexpected result of 8%, after having failed to make it to the Romanian Parliament in the latest parliamentary elections. Another success story is that of President Basescu's youngest daughter, Elena. She left the Liberal Democratic Party upon accusations of nepotism, ran as independent and won 4% of the votes in the June 7th elections.
On the same day, she joined the Liberal Democratic Party again, just a few minutes after exit-polls were made public. At European level, the distribution of the 33 Romanian Euro MPs indicates a clear victory of the centre-right European People's Party that gets 10 seats from the Liberal Democratic Party, 4 from the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania and 1 from the president's daughter, dubbed by the Western media 'the brunette Barbie' or the 'Carpathian Paris Hilton'.
The European Socialists will receive the 11 seats of the Romanian Social Democrats, while the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe will get the 5 seats of the National Liberal Party. The three representatives of the Greater Romania Party, that does not belong to any European ideological family, are free to choose any party they like. One of them, businessman and football club owner Gigi Becali , under investigation for having sequestered three criminals who had stolen his car, seems to have already opted for the Liberal Democratic Party.
This came as a heavy blow to the Greater Romania Party leader, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, a former senator and court poet of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The most striking result however, does not refer either to the parties' score or to the distribution of seats, but to the record low turnout, of 72%, among the lowest in the EU and the lowest in Romania’s post-communist electoral history.
The prolonged weekend, occasioned by the Orthodox celebration of Whitsuntide, the rather abstract prerogatives of the Strasbourg Parliament and, above all, Romanians' being fed up with an alienated political class are the analysts' favourite explanations of the low turnout. Mutual accusations of fraud, launched by the two ruling parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Liberal Democratic Party, the polemics over the nomination of Romania's European Commissioner, amplify the feeling that the parties cannot help getting the most important European issues in the middle of their domestic battle for power.
Hence, the confession of a former anti-communist dissident, writer Liviu Antonesei, carried by the COTIDIANUL daily:, quote: ''The lists include few good options. But it's one thing to know them only theoretically and a completely different matter to have the ballot paper in your hand. So I spent about 10 minutes in the polling booth analysing the offer and then voted for the lesser evil'.
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