Romania's Politics of Dejection

In November and December 2000, Romania conducted largely free and fair elections for both parliament and the presidency, resulting in the second peaceful turnover of power in its short postcommunist history. But what might in theory have been considered a milestone of democratic consolidation was in practice regarded by many foreign and domestic observers as a serious setback for Romanian democracy. For whatever the merits of the election process, its outcome was highly discouraging for Romania's democrats. The Democratic Convention of Romania (CDR), a broad anticommunist coalition of Liberals and Christian Democrats that had come to power in the 1996 elections, was crushed at the polls.

The chief beneficiary of the collapse of the center was the leftist Party of Social Democracy of Romania (PDSR). The PDSR won a decisive plurality in parliament, and its leader Ion Iliescu, an ex-communist who had served as Romania's first postcommunist president from 1990 to 1996, regained the presidency, succeeding the CDR's Emil Constantinescu. While the victory of Iliescu and the PSDR can be regarded as part of a much broader regional pattern of former communists returning to power on a platform of softening the rigors of market reform, another aspect of Romania's 2000 elections was largely unprecedented. This was the strong showing of the extreme nationalist Greater Romania Party (PRM), whose charismatic leader Corneliu Vadim Tudor soared in popularity to finish a strong second to Iliescu in the first round. Thus, in the presidential runoff on December 10, Romanian voters were confronted with a choice between an ex-communist and an extreme nationalist.

In order to place the 2000 elections in the proper context, it is necessary to compare them to the elections held four years earlier. Table 1 illustrates the severe electoral losses suffered by the governing center-right political forces (the CDR and the National Liberal Party, or PNL), whose combined seat share dropped by more than 75 percent between 1996 and 2000. Of the two junior coalition partners of the former government, only the Hungarian Democratic Union (UDMR) succeeded in retaining the confidence of its electorate (which is ethnically based), while the center-left Democratic Party (PD) lost over 40 percent of its previous seats. This shrinking of the center benefited both extremes of the political spectrum. The leftist PDSR picked up an additional 64 seats, although it fell short of attaining an absolute majority in parliament. The extremist PRM made even larger gains, more than quadrupling its seat share, partly at the expense of the center but also by capturing the majority of the nationalist electorate, which in 1996 had been evenly split between the PRM and the Romanian National Unity Party (PUNR).

Table 2 shows a similar trend of increasing polarization between the 1996 and 2000 presidential elections. (In both years a runoff was required as no candidate won a majority in the first round.) Again, the centrist parties were the main losers in 2000. The most serious decline was suffered by the center-left candidate, former prime minister Petre Roman of the PD, whose vote share virtually collapsed between the two elections. Meanwhile, the combined tally for the two center-right candidates in 2000, Theodor Stolojan of the PNL and Mugur Isarescu of the rump CDR (which ran as CDR 2000), was relatively close to the first-round performance of the single center-right candidate in 1996, Emil Constantinescu. In 2000, both center-right candidates enjoyed relatively high levels of personal popularity--Stolojan because he was in no way associated with the mistakes of the previous government, and Isarescu due to his surprisingly high approval ratings as prime minister in the year preceding the elections. ¹ Yet both candidates were weighed down by the low popularity of their parties and, more importantly, by the inability of the center-right to unite behind a single presidential candidate. Although the ballot results suggest that even a unitary candidate might have failed to outpoll extreme...