Romanian leftists win the parliamentary election, but the president is still up in the air

Romania’s center-left and leftist parties seemed to have held off a surge by the country’s nationalist right in Sunday’s parliamentary election. Now, all eyes are on a decision from the country’s highest court later Monday on whether to throw out the results of a presidential election.

It caused chaos in Romania, which is a member of both the European Union and NATO, when a shocking result happened in the first round of the presidential election on November 24. A candidate from the far right who wasn’t well known won big, which made people think that someone from a country that has been a strong friend of Ukraine might have meddled in the election.

The first round of voting was recounted by Romania’s Constitutional Court, which will decide at 1500 GMT whether to accept the results of the presidential election or not.

Calin Georgescu, an independent far-right candidate, will face Elena Lasconi, a center-right candidate, in a run-off vote on December 8 if the court agrees with the results.

Toni Grebla, the head of Romania’s election authority, said on Monday that the recount of the 9.46 million votes cast in the first round did not show any big differences.

Authorities in Romania say that the country is a major target for hostile actors like Russia. They have also charged the video-sharing site TikTok of favoring one candidate over others. Both Russia and TikTok say they did nothing wrong.

The ruling leftist Social Democrat (PSD) party won the second of three elections for parliament in as many weeks on Sunday. This sets the stage for a time when coalitions with middle parties are likely to form.

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The website for Stirile Pro TV reported Social Democrat Vice President Victor Negrescu as saying, “We want a coalition that will keep Romania on the path to Europe.”

“We expect the democratic, pro-European parties to understand that the Social Democratic Party can be the balancing factor around which a future majority can be formed.”

PART OF THE PRESIDENT

After counting 99.97% of the votes in the parliamentary election, the PSD had 22.3% of the votes, which was more than the hard-right Alliance for Uniting Romanians, which had 18.3%.

Save Romania Union (USR), Lasconi’s moderate opposition party, got 12.3% of the vote, while the Liberals, a junior partner in the ruling coalition, got 14.3%. SOS and POT, two far-right groups, got 7.8% and 6.4%, respectively. The ethnic Hungarian Party UDMR got 6.4%.

Ilie Bolojan, the head of the Liberal Party, said that the group was “willing to participate in… a coalition so that we can lead the way in modernizing our country.”

But who forms the government will rest on who wins the presidential election because the president chooses the prime minister, and it’s not clear when that will happen.

This means that Georgescu might be able to let the far-right parties, which got more than 30% of the vote, form a government.

The leader of the far-right SOS group, Diana Sosoaca, asked the nationalist groups to work together.

Her website quotes her as saying, “I call on all patriotic, sovereigntist, and nationalist forces to come together and form a nationalist government, even if it is a minority one.”