Austerity measures bring about new political order

Newsroom 18/06/2012 | 08:40

The ruling Social Liberal Union (USL) won important mayoral and county positions countrywide in last week’s local elections, building support ahead of the November parliamentary ballot. Romanians voted emphatically in favor of the new governing coalition in protest over the austerity measures rolled out by the former Democratic Liberal Party (PDL) government.

More parking space, better public services, investments in infrastructure, including an urban highway and the construction of a canal to connect Bucharest with the Danube, building an Olympic village, and investments in hospitals, schools and nurseries – these are just some of the targets which independent candidate Sorin Oprescu has set for his second term at the helm of the Bucharest City Hall.

USL-backed Oprescu last week won his second mandate as mayor of Bucharest with 54.8 percent of the vote. And this time around he also has the support of the city general council where the center-left USL won the majority of the seats.

PDL representative Silviu Prigoana came in second in the race for the capital with 17.1 percent of the ballot, according to the official count, announced last Wednesday by the electoral bureau.

“In my opinion we had an honorable result and so did the PDL, considering the general context of the elections, following the austerity measures which I believe were good even if we had to pay for them politically,” said Prigoana.

Overall, the Bucharest City Hall budget approved for this year amounts to some RON 4.64 billion (approximately EUR 1.07 billion).

The general mayor position was not the PDL’s only defeat in Bucharest. The party led by former PM Emil Boc was also the big loser in the race for Bucharest’s six districts, with the only non-USL mayor in Bucharest remaining District 2’s Neculai Ontanu (National Union for Romania’s Progress).

The poor results in Bucharest prompted Elena Udrea, head of the Bucharest PDL organization and former minister of tourism and regional development, to resign from her position.

“This is a test day for those who governed Romania at times of crisis,” President Traian Basescu, a PDL supporter, told reporters on the day of the elections. The final results however, were disappointing for the PDL, who came in a distant second behind the USL.

Only two PDL candidates were elected as presidents of county councils, down from fourteen four years ago.

The PSD and PNL, on the other hand, saw 35 candidates named county council presidents, a position considered very important in the parliamentary elections. The majority of mayoral seats were grabbed by USL representatives, who won 41 percent of the mayoral races, followed by the PDL with 15.6 percent, while the PSD got 12 percent (the party ran separately in several cities).

The PDL’s disappointing results, which took the party below the 20 percent threshold, did not pass without casualties. The party’s leaders handed in their resignations last Thursday, including former PM Boc. “We have taken political responsibility for the results. I will not run for another term as head of the party,” said Boc.

There was the odd bright spot. Despite the overall defeat, the PDL managed to retain strongholds like Cluj-Napoca, where Boc narrowly beat the USL candidate, Brasov and Piatra-Neamt.

One of the USL’s unexpected wins, on the other hand, came from Social Democratic candidate Lia Olguta Vasilescu against Antonie Solomon in the southern Romanian city of Craiova, making her the first female mayor of a major Romanian city.

The local elections proved the legitimacy of the USL government, argued PM Victor Ponta, head of the political alliance. He added that the result had surpassed the expectations of both the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) and were the best in the history of the two parties.

The results are good news for the USL also in light of the November parliamentary vote. Nothing is guaranteed, however, with analysts predicting it will all boil down to whether Ponta’s government sticks to the promises it has made and gets the economy going again and the USL’s politicians don’t repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.

Ponta previously promised to restore the public sector wages reduced by the former government and cut some taxes in order to stimulate growth, while sticking to an International Monetary Fund-led aid deal.

The curious case of Nicusor Dan

Independent Nicusor Dan, who ran both for the Bucharest city hall and a seat on the general city council, was the main talking point of the elections.

A mathematician and president of the Save Bucharest association, he won strong support from civil society and Bucharest’s artistic community with a prominent campaign in social media. He was described by his supporters as a long-awaited alternative and a breath of fresh air amid disappointing politicians.

Dan, received 8.5 percent of the votes for the city hall, putting him fourth after Oprescu, Prigoana and the representative of the populist PP-DD party led by Dan Diaconescu.

For the city council position – the more realistic goal of his campaign – he received 4.7 percent of the votes, below the 5 percent threshold for an independent. Party members from the USL, PDL and PP-DD, however, managed to make it onto the council with about three times fewer votes than Dan, highlighting the discriminatory and discouraging conditions facing independent candidates.

Under the current law, the USL gained 35 seats on the city council with a total of 307,000 votes, the PDL won 12 seats with 91,000 votes and PP-DD got the remaining seven with a total of 58,000 votes. Dan received more than 40,000 votes but did not make it onto the council. Following the result, he filed an appeal at the Constitutional Court and is confident the matter will be resolved in his favor.

The elections in the international press

So Romanians punished the former ruling PDL for the austerity measures it had implemented, wrote the international press.

“Romanian voters went to the polls on Sunday in the first electoral test of the ruling leftists since they came to power on a wave of discontent over austerity measures in the European Union’s second-poorest economy,” said Reuters.

Following the slashed public salaries and raised sales tax in 2010, “the party was so badly damaged it has struggled to hold on to second place ahead of the populist Dan Diaconescu, whose new party wants steep tax cuts”, added the same source.

AFP reported, “Romania’s ruling center-left coalition USL claimed victory in Sunday’s local elections, just a month after it wrested power from the previous center-right government through a no-confidence motion.”

Meanwhile German press agency DPA reported that the election results were expected to bolster Ponta and the USL ahead of the parliamentary elections in November.

Simona Bazavan

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