Autumn's Elections Remain Open To Any Result

The preliminary outcome of the local elections - estimated based on exit polls - are, as expectable, intricate enough for each of the two main competitors, PSD and DA Alliance, to be able to call itself a winner.

To support its side of the story, so to speak, PSD can bring forth the good score it hopes to have at countrywide level. According to Premier Adrian Nastase's estimations, PSD expects to have scored some 40 percent of the ballots cast for parties. If this score is accurate, it will confirm two things: first, PSD remains the most important party in Romania and, second, a significant part of the voters appreciate the incumbent administration, which therefore has a good chance to win the parliamentary and presidential elections due this fall.

Another argument backing PSD's optimism is that the victory it traditionally achieves in rural communities and small town has "spread' to some cities, too. Polls indicate that PSD won, in the first ballot, a number of cities including Iasi or Constanta, which had declined PSD's offer for the previous ten years. Moreover, PSD also won the majority in city councils... Even in Cluj, where the Alliance now has the majority in The City Council and a second round will be called to elect the mayor, the score obtained by PSD's candidate Ioan Rus is better than ever. PSD's expansion to urban areas is good news for this party, but things will not be easy because a fierce opponent is in its way.

The best argument in this respect is PSD's defeat in Bucharest. Even though Mircea Geoana turned out a worthy opponent to Basescu, he did not even rally half as much ballots as Basescu did, despite his popularity. The problems did not end here, as PSD got less votes for The City Council than it did four years before. Bottom line is PSD lost the elections in Bucharest to the Alliance, despite having used one of its core units, so to speak. Analyses and comments to follow will surely reveal many factors that contributed to the Alliance's victory, from the more influential media hostile to PSD to the technical aspects of campaign management on both sides.

Importantly, the main factor that delivered victory to the Alliance in Bucharest - and could be decisive in the elections this fall - was the Alliance itself. In Bucharest, more than anywhere else in the country, The PNL - PD Alliance managed to rally all those who do not usually vote for PSD around Traian Basescu and his team. Moreover, the Alliance managed to capitalize on the fact that, essentially, PSD is a minority party.

There was also another factor that helped Basescu emerge victorious, but the Alliance will not be able to use it this fall: Basescu is in power in Bucharest, just as PSD is in power at countrywide level. From this standpoint, the campaign that Basescu mounted for The Bucharest City Hall resembled the campaign that PSD is mounting for the general elections rather than the campaign that the Alliance prepared for the rest of the country. One thing that differentiates the year 2004 local elections from the year 2000 local elections is that voters now seemed more inclined to ensure the continuity of those already in power - other victories by "traditional' mayors suggest it - which obviously does not help the Alliance's mostly negative campaign.

Beyond the fact that they leave open the battle for this autumn's parliamentary elections and suggest that anything may happen then, last Sunday's local elections have sanctioned an already forecast defeat and seem to herald another one.

Without doubt, PNTCD is the grand loser of this elections. The victory that its candidate achieved in Timisoara is an exception that makes the countrywide defeat all the more painful. The recent elections are practically PNTCD's exit cue from the political history of post-communist Romania, as its leaders have managed to turn the accidental defeat suffered in the fall of 2000 into a terminal defeat.

PRM seems to be another major loser of Sunday's elections. By the time I am writing this, PRM's score countrywide is not known precisely, but it is clear that this party has taken at least two serious blows: in Bucharest and in Cluj. In Bucharest, PRM only scored a disappointing six percent, despite the fact that the capital used to be an important votes reserve for this party. In the parliamentary, not local, elections held in 2000, PRM's score in Bucharest equaled ten percent of its total score. Of course, Dumitru Dragomir is not Corneliu Vadim Tudor and so PRM may do better in the autumn that it did last Sunday. However, for a party that once trumpeted plans to win the parliamentary elections and place its candidate on the presidential seat, this score is too low.

Things went even worse in Cluj, as PRM's mayor of three terms, Gheorghe Funar, did not even qualify for the second round, while the party as a whole scored less votes for The Cluj City Council than it did in 2000. Given the particular nature of local elections, this may be an accident. However, the overall score accomplished by his party will probably temper Vadim's absolute confidence in the crushing victory he is hoping to achieve this fall and maybe even make him more attentive to facts...

PUR's score is rather ambiguous. The complete defeat suffered in Bucharest - both in the mayoral elections and in the elections for aldermen - is only partially compensated by local scores above the electoral threshold of five percent. Unfortunately for them, PUR cannot count on any electoral "locomotive' for the general elections and, perhaps more importantly, the political impact of the television channel that supported it in the local elections turned out to be minimum. Another piece of news - good in general, bad for PUR - is that Romanian voters are past the point where they could be influenced by a biased television channel, admitting that such point ever existed.

A general conclusion that can be drawn from the preliminary results of the local elections is that voting options were highly politicized as constituents tended to take either of the two major sides in the political competition - PSD and the Alliance. The small parties caught in between PSD and the Alliance tend to become even smaller and lose both force and influence.

It is likely that this votes will be less and less fragmented this fall, and that voters may be more and more inclined to focus on the fundamental alternatives.