Romania: recent political developments and 2024 elections

Constitution and political background

Romania has been described as a semi-presidential republic with the President sharing executive power with the government led by the Prime Minister. The President takes a leading role in foreign affairs and represents Romania in the European Council (bringing together EU heads of state and government).

Most governments in Romania since 2012 have been led by the Social Democratic Party (PSD) but it has clashed on several occasions with Romania’s elected presidents. This includes disagreements with the current president, Klaus Iohannis, as well as attempts to remove his predecessor from office. Iohannis has been in office since 2014 and is associated with the National Liberal Party (PNL), the PSD’s main rival in this period.

Several PSD leaders have faced corruption charges. Proposals by the PSD-led government to reduce penalties or decriminalise certain corruption offences in 2017 and reduce the President’s role in appointing prosecutors led to mass protests and criticisms from President Iohannis. In 2018, the government dismissed the chief anti-corruption prosecutor Laura Kövesi, later appointed to the EU post of European Public Prosecutor.

The government’s actions in this period were criticised by the European Commission, which was monitoring Romania under the post-EU accession Co-operation and Verification Mechanism (CVM).

The PSD was out of office from 2019 to 2021 but returned as part of a grand coalition with the PNL in late 2021. In 2022, parliament adopted new legislation which met commitments under the CVM, leading to a European Commission recommendation that the monitoring be discontinued.

Since the 2020 election, there has been increasing support for parties described as far right and nationalist, including the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR) and SOS Romania, which have questioned Romania’s membership of the EU and NATO and its support for Ukraine. Increased support for these parties has also been attributed to public anger with corruption, disillusionment with the ruling parties and a desire for alternatives to the PSD and PNL since they formed their grand coalition.

Presidential election, November 2024

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, SOS Romania leader Diana Șoșoacă was banned from standing in the election by the constitutional court, on the grounds that her anti-EU and anti-NATO positions were incompatible with the constitution. Polls ahead of the election indicated that it would result in a second-round run-off between PSD leader and Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu and AUR leader George Simion. However, in a shock result, an independent candidate previously associated with the AUR, Călin Georgescu, led in the first round of the election on 24 November 2024. Elena Lasconi, leader of the centre-right anti-corruption Save Romania Union (USR) came second and was scheduled to face Georgescu in the run-off. Ciolacu came third.

Georgescu had lagged well behind several other candidates in the opinion polls but had gained traction through a social media campaign in the lead-up to the election. Georgescu has taken nationalist, anti-EU and “anti-globalist” stances. Following the first round, he said he would stop all Romanian political and military support for Ukraine if elected.

On 4 December 2024, intelligence documents were declassified detailing what was described as a massive and “highly organised” campaign for Georgescu on the TikTok platform which was likely orchestrated by a “state actor”. This was implied to be Russia, though it was not directly blamed.

On 6 December 2024, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the result of the presidential election. It said the irregularities revealed by the intelligence assessment had interfered in the principle of free and fair elections. Georgescu denounced the decision as a “barbaric act” while Simion described it as a “coup d’etat”. Lasconi also criticised the decision.

Parliamentary elections, December 2024

In the meantime, parliamentary elections had been held on 1 December. PSD was the lead party with a reduced vote share of 22%. AUR came second with 18% of the vote. Another new party, the Party of Young People (POT), which supported Georgescu in the presidential election, won 6.5% of the vote. The vote of AUR, SOS Romania and POT combined was close to a third of the electorate. 

Following the election, PSD together with PNL, USR and the ethnic Hungarian UDMR party discussed forming a pro-EU governing coalition. This was despite PNL saying during the election that it would not renew its coalition with PSD and USR’s criticisms of both parties. The four parties appeared to have reached an agreement on 11 December, but there were then disagreements between PSD and USR with the latter seeking tighter budgetary commitments. 

The PSD announced it was withdrawing from talks on 19 December, but then returned to talks within a few days with the USR no longer involved. On 23 December, an agreement was announced on a coalition government involving PSD, PNL and UDMR, with support also from smaller ethnic minority parties. The agreement also involves the governing parties fielding a single presidential candidate for the re-run in 2025.