Halfway down the Danube: Election results (1)

November 29, 2004

Election results (1)

They're still counting. But it's getting interesting.

It looks like, yep, just four parties in Parliament.

UDMR, the Hungarian minority party, came in unexpectedly strong. The internal split among the Hungarians never materialized, and UDMR took about 8% of the vote.

PRM, the obnoxious nationalist-populist "Partidul Romania Mare" (Party of Greater Romania), got about 13%. This is a drop from the 18%-19% that they got four years ago. Unfortunately, it looks like they might get into government anyhow -- see below.

The Liberal/Democrat opposition coalition, the Democratic Alliance, got about 32%. This was better than expected, and put them only a bit behind...

...PSD/PUR, the current ruling party. The PSD ("Partidul Social Democrat") and their PUR allies got about 34%. This was less than expected, and the Parliamentary vote trailed PSD presidential candidate Adrian Nastase by several percentage points.

(Non-final numbers, BTW. Votes are still being counted.)

Now, remember: parties that don't get at least 5% of the vote, don't get any seats in Parliament. (Except for a handful of seats reserved for small ethnic minorities. We'll get back to them later.)

So, although the four parties named only got about 87% of the vote, they're going to divide 100% of the seats in Parliament. Keeping that in mind, and using these numbers, we get the following distribution of power in the next Parliament:

PSD/PUR -- about 39%
Alliance -- about 37%
PRM -- about 15%
UDMR -- about 9%

If these figures hold, then we have a potentially interesting situation.

PSD/PUR plus the Hungarians will fall just short of a majority. The odious PRM plus the opposition Alliance could form a government... except that the Alliance has sworn up and down that they will never, ever ally with PRM.

So now what?

1) PSD/PUR joins with PRM. (Hawk, spit.) Possible. Not much else to say at this time, except that it would be pretty disgusting. (PRM is just creepy. Xenophobic, vaguely fascistic. Run by Ceausescu's former court poet.)

2) Minority government -- PSD plus the Hungarians, relying on the opposition's inability to unite. Possible, but probably unstable. Sure, the Alliance wouldn't govern together with PRM. But they'd probably be willing to work with PRM to bring the government down.

3) PSD goes fishing, and seeks to suck some Alliance and PRM members over to its side until it has enough for a majority. Possible, even likely. A small handful of members would be enough to tip the balance. But will take a while. Not inconsistent with (2).

4) Both sides go fishing for those ethnic minority members -- the lone Serb, the single Croat, the solitary Gypsy, etc. -- in order to squeak out a narrow majority. Unlikely but possible, and would certainly be interesting.

5) Big coalition -- PSD/PUR joins with the Alliance, or with some complete piece of the Alliance. (Remember that the Alliance is a rather rickety coalition of opposition parties, so it's not impossible that one piece of it might bolt.) Theoretically possible, but doesn't seem likely at the moment.

6) Hung Parliament -- nobody can form a majority government, and the opposition parties won't let a minority government take power. This could result in new elections. But I think this is unlikely. (The Serbs got a weird Parliament earlier this year, but they toughed it out for nearly three months until they finally managed to make it work. Sort of. Anyway, point is, hung Parliaments get talked about a lot, but are pretty rare in practice.

And then, (7) when the votes are all counted, it turns out that PSD/PUR + UDMR has a narrow majority after all. Still possible. And if this happens, then I'd expect the new government to stabilize pretty quickly -- Romanian legislators have a long history of abandoning their parties to join the majority in power.

Did I mention the Presidential election? Nastase led the pack, but Basescu was just a few percentage points behind -- 39% to 34%. (PRM perpetual candidate Vadim Tudor got about 12%). So there will be a runoff in two weeks.

Most of us were thinking that the Presidential race would be largely symbolic, because the Presidency of Romania is pretty much a symbolic office. But one if the President's powers is to decide who gets the first chance to form a government. And when a Parliament is very closely balanced, that can make all the difference.

Two additional complicating wrinkles: (1) Parliament has two houses, which have slightly different vote totals. Let's not even discuss this now. (2) Accusations of vote fraud, which are already flying. These seem to be retail rather than wholesale -- lots of local skullduggery rather than massive nationwide theft -- but the election is close enough that, yah, they could make a difference. The OSCE monitored the election, and is expected to have a report out soon.