[Link and postscript fixed.]
Social Democrats claim to be in a position to supplant the current Liberal-led coalition after today’s legislative election in Romania , AFP reports:
Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu pleaded with stay-away voters in the hours before polling stations closed, but the 39 percent turnout was the lowest since the fall of communism in 1989.
Exit polls by the Insomar and CCSB institutes gave the Social Democrats 36 percent of the votes that were cast, ahead of the right-wing Liberal Democrats with 30.5 percent, and Tariceanu’s ruling Liberals with just over 20 percent. [...]
The first general elections since Romania joined the EU in 2007, and the sixth since the end of communism, saw the far-right Greater Romania Party, the country’s second political force in 2000, unable to get into parliament for the first time.
But the junior partner in the Liberal-led government, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR), was likely to figure in coalition talks with about seven percent support, according to CCSB.
To this institutionalist, this election is noteworthy not simply because it is the first since Romania joined the EU, but because it is the first nonconcurrent legislative election in Romania as well as the first under a reformed electoral system.
Romania has a premier-presidential system (the variant of semi-presidentialism in which the president has the most limited powers over government formation and legislation). If the opposition were able to form a majority, Romania would experience cohabitation for the first time (see below). Until recent constitutional changes, cohabitation was unlikely (to result from elections), because the assembly was elected at the same time as the first round of the presidential elections.
However, initiative in the naming of a prime minister after a parliamentary election remains with the president, and so the continuation of a coalition led by the president’s rightist allies remains likely. (In 2004, cohabitation was averted only by a flip of one party from one pre-electoral alliance to the other, once the presidential runoff result was known; see previous discussion.) Presidential elections are not due for a year, as the term is now five years (while the terms for both houses of parliament remain at four). Of course, if Romania does not get cohabitation now, it could yet get it a year from now, if President Traian Basescu loses his expected reelection bid.
As for the new electoral system, it seems still to be PR, but with some sort of local component. Maybe. See discussion in a previous comment thread.
For more detail, see Manuel Alvarez-Rivera.
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P.S. Press accountability: The linked AFP item is wrong when it says:
For the first time, senators and deputies were elected in a single round of voting, using a combination of party and candidate lists.
While there is evidently a change in the ballot format, a single round is nothing new. In past elections, only the presidency has been elected in two rounds.
Late correction: Actually, the outgoing government was a cohabitation situation, though not one that had resulted directly from elections. The government formed after the 2004 parliamentary and presidential elections was a coalition that included the president’s party. But in 2007, the PM (from a then-allied party) fired the ministers from the president’s party, reshuffled the cabinet among the remaining parties, and won the confidence of parliament. Thereby a cohabitation cabinet was created, and, this being a premier-presidential system, the president lacked the constitutional power to do anything about it!
Robert Elgie notes that President Basescu has nominated Theodor Stolojan, an ally connected to the Democratic Liberal Party, to be PM.
The PM-designate will try to form a coalition with the Social Democrats.
This is noteworthy because these two parties were in opposing pre-electoral alliances as recently as 2004.
Seed planted by MSS — 11 December 2008 @ 21:48
A brief update: Stolojan has withdrawn his nomination and President Basescu has chosen Emil Boc from the PD-L to replace him. The new coalition is interesting because it excludes the UDMR, the Hungarian minority representatives. They have been a fixture of governments for the last 12 years, but the PDS opposed their inclusion this time, presumably to court a nationalist vote.
Seed planted by Robert Elgie — 15 December 2008 @ 15:44
First of all, thanks for the link to my Romania posting.
As it turned out, the distribution of parliamentary mandates under Romania’s new electoral system was almost completely determined by PR, and the introduction of single-member constituencies had practically no impact whatsoever in the distribution of parliamentary seats among parties, other than for an extra Chamber of Deputies seat for the Democrat-Liberals (although it made them the largest party in the lower house).
Moreover, the local component came with a catch: the allocation of seats distributed by PR in single-member constituencies resulted in many constituencies being represented by candidates who arrived second, third or lower – in all, 117 of 452 (41 of 137 in the Senate, 76 of 315 in the Chamber). The most egregious example of this was in the Chamber of Deputies special constituency for expatriates in Africa and the Middle East, where the Hungarian minority party (UDMR) candidate won office despite coming in seventh place with just 34 votes. However, that particular seat was the last upper-tier mandate to be assigned to a multi-member constituency, and it had to be shoehorned into the expatriate constituency because there were no unfilled seats anywhere else, so even PR-wise it was a poor fit. In fact, a similar case occurred in the 2005 parliamentary election in Norway, which uses a two-tier, party-list proportional representation system (described in further detail on my website’s Norway page).
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 16 December 2008 @ 02:21
Sorry, Manuel, but your Norway link came up blank (leaving me in suspense!)
Seed planted by Tom Round — 16 December 2008 @ 16:43
I changed the Norway link to what I think it was supposed to be. (It was missing the “http” and had some weird alphanumeric string instead of “allocation2005.”)
Seed planted by MSS — 16 December 2008 @ 18:29
In any sytems awarding remainder seats one by one to lower-tier districts, the last seat can only be allocated to the district with the last vacancy, no matter how many votes that party gained over there. The UDMR candidate for African expatriates would have won even with no votes; the UDMR strategy (in every constituency a candidate) was a good one, because no-one could foresee where your last seat would end up.
(I have no idea how the electoral law would solve the problem if UDMR had no candidate in Africa)
In Belgium in 1985, a senator was elected that way with 0,27% of the votes in a 3 seat-district.
It was very remarkable because he was elected for a flemish regionalist party (Volksunie) in a Walloon district (Nivelles) with almost no flemish-speaking inhabitants.
The goal to have overall proportionality between districts and between parties is better achieved by the ‘biproportional rule’ in the Zürich electoral system. According to Michel Balinski (Le suffrage universel inachevé) it deviates the least form district-by-district allocation to achieve the nationwide proportionality.
Seed planted by Bancki — 17 December 2008 @ 07:41
The changed electoral system might be more consequential for the balance of power *within* rather than between parties, providing strong incentives for local political bosses to focus on accumulating sufficient votes and resources to get elected for an SMDs directly, rather than being dependent on the unpredictable PR allocation mechanism. A recipe for (still more marked) patronage politics and (still more) fragmented political parties perhaps? I believe the number of PSD candidates, who managed to get elected for SMDs directly with 50%+ votes than for any other party.
Seed planted by Sean Hanley — 17 December 2008 @ 08:09
While the PSD-led alliance won more seats by absolute majority than PD-L in the Chamber of Deputies as well as the Senate, in both houses the Democrat-Liberals actually had a larger number of first-place finishes (with or without an absolute majority) than any other party, as I noted earlier this month on an update to my Romania posting. I thought this was rather interesting, since by some accounts the single-member constituency boundaries had been gerrymandered to favor PSD and PNL.
By the way, the procedure used in Romania to assign remainder seats among multi-member constituencies sometimes allows a party to win more than one constituency seat at a time. For example, the re-allocation of remainder Senate seats gave PD-L two mandates in Alba county.
Finally, I apologize for the problems with the (now fixed) link to my website’s Norway page. To make a long story short, the URL I furnished had curly (instead of plain) quotation marks, which must have confused the system to no end.
Seed planted by Manuel Alvarez-Rivera — 17 December 2008 @ 22:49