Halfway down the Danube

After the Elections

So the local elections are over.

"Local" here means for mayors, city and communal councils, and county councils. There are 265 cities in Romania, each with a mayor and a city council. Then, outside the cities, there are about 2700 "communes" -- rural political divisions consisting of several villages. Each commune has a mayor and a council too.

Then, at the regional level, the whole country is divided into 41 counties, or judets. Each judet elects its own county council. However, the judets differ from the cities and the communes in one key respect. The chief executive of a judet -- the prefect -- is not elected. Instead, he's appointed by the government in Bucharest.

To give a crude analogy for our American readers: it's as if the 50 states had their own legislatures, but the state Governors were appointed from Washington by the President.

This system has some interesting effects on Romanian politics.

See, the prefects control the government bureacracies in each judet. Within the government, they can hire, fire and promote. Outside it, they can give out millions of dollars of government contracts and order inspections and audits of businesses and individuals. They also tend to have a lot of influence over local media, since Romanian newspapers and (especially) TV stations tend to be heavily dependent upon the government for advertising revenue and various sorts of soft subsidies.

So, if the prefect dislikes some local elected official, he has a lot of power to make that local official's life miserable. And if a county council, say, is controlled by a rival party, the prefect can easily harass that council and obstruct its activities. The council, on the other hand, can't do much to hurt the prefect; he's appointed from Bucharest, he stays in office at the will of the central government, and the bureacracies under him are funded with federal money.

The result... well, during the last round of elections, four years ago the Social Democrat Party (PSD) won about a third of the local races. However, they won a smashing victory at the national level, gaining control of Parliament and both the Presidency and the Prime Minister's office. PSD prefects duly took power all across Romania...

...and soon, it was noticed that mayors and council members were switching parties. Thousands of them, all across the country. Month after month, year after year, a steady stream of elected officials abandoned their original parties and switched over to PSD.

In the 2000 elections, PSD had won about one third of the local races. But by 2004, PSD controlled about two-thirds of the mayor's offices and council seats. Being non-PSD was just too hard.

Not that it's about PSD, per se. If the opposition Liberals and Democrats win the national elections in November, they'll appoint a new set of prefects. In which case I predict that we'll see thousands of mayors and council members, all across Romania, switching parties to join the Liberals and Democrats.

(Is this a bug, or a feature? I leave that question to my Romanian readers.)

The major exceptions to this trend werein the big cities. Bucharest, most notably, had a mayor who was not only non-PSD but aggressively anti-PSD. Timisoara, Brasov and Cluj also had non-PSD Mayors. The reason for this, I think, was that a large city provided an independent power base big enough to resist the central government.

Sunday's election seemed to confirm both of these trends. On one hand, PSD won almost 2/3 of the elections for mayors and city council seats. On the other hand, the smaller parties were still quite competitive in the big cities. Non-PSD candidates won again in Bucharest, Timisoara, Baia Mare, and Brasov, and forced PSD candidates into runoff elections in Cluj, Galati, Oradea, Arad, Braila, and Ploiesti.

What does it all mean? Well, I'd say that while there were some very interesting individual races -- Bucharest and Cluj, in particular -- overall the election didn't present too many surprises. PSD swept the small cities and the "communes" (groups of villages), especially in the east and south; the main opposition parties were strong in the biggest cities but floundering nationwide. About as expected.

PSD supporters would say this is the legitimate reward for success -- three and a half years of economic growth, NATO accession. Opponents will point to it as a result of the overcentralized political system plus PSD outspending its opponents by three or four to one, and will decry a gradual trend backwards towards de facto one party rule.

Next up: runoff elections, for mayoral races where no single candidate won a majority, on June 20th. Then national elections in November.

Posted by douglas at June 8, 2004 12:55 PM