Romanian Parties and Post-Communist Democracy

Abstract

This chapter aims to map the features that make up the Romanian party politics three decades after the collapse of the communist regime. The analysis starts by identifying the main stages in the development of Romanian party politics, from the extreme fluidity of the early 1990s to the progressive closure of the party system starting in the 2000s. On the one side, this stabilization has been equated to a predictable competition for government offices and regular inter-party relations; on the other, the Romanian low number of parliamentary political parties was increasingly criticized for hampering the possibilities for a renewed supply of parties, reinforcing corruption and collusive practices, and, implicitly, generating a limited turnover in power. On this ground, different organizations and various political entrepreneurs have voiced the need to defend traditional values in politics; the 2020 Romanian general elections brought a relevant populist radical right populist party to Parliament. Beyond this electoral success, the AUR’s arrival to national politics has given more visibility to the illiberal traits of politics and shed light on the vulnerability of the Romanian post-communist democracy.

Among the former communist countries which launched democratization in 1989, Romania was the only one whose regime change was born out of violence. The initial enthusiasm for democratization from below, evidenced by crowds shouting ‘Freedom!’ in the streets and the symbolic booing of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s last speech, vanished rapidly (Garton Ash 1993: 20). Some scholars questioned if it was conceptually justified to speak of the regime change as a revolution (Roper 2000; Siani-Davies 2005). Others focused on the empirical dynamics and pinpointed to a variable mixture of popular uprising and a coup initiated by members of the communist elites (Verdery and Kligman 1992: 401–410; Petrescu 2010; Sandru et al. 2020). Bogdan (2017) convincingly described the December 1989 events as contradictory, complex, and bloody. As she argued, ‘what the revolution of 1989 demonstrates is that the overthrow and execution of a dictator operating under the yoke of communist ideology neither amount to the death of communism, nor reflect a break with the communist ideology’ (2017: 101). From this point of view, Romania initially remained trapped in a partial regime change, a limbo during which authoritarian traits pervaded a reasonably functional electoral democracy (Mungiu-Pippidi 2002: 187). Despite the rapid adoption of procedural democratic norms, the government’s use of physical violence and limited regard for fundamental civil rights, its dislike of institutional compromise and distrust of (occasionally even hostility to) the parliamentary opposition, the stigmatization of minorities as undesirable and unhealthy for the wellbeing of the Romanian majority, the severe limitations imposed on the freedom of expression, as well as the obstacles and constraints faced by the system of private property showed the country’s incomplete detachment from the communist past during the 1990s (Stan 1995; Mungiu-Pippidi 2002; Preda 2005; Gallagher 2005). However, the prospect of joining the European Union (EU) and NATO brought an increased consensus on democracy. This consensus within both the elites and the society eventually activated the so-called integration magnet (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009) that increasingly pulled the mainstream political parties towards a liberal market economy and support for multiculturalism, open society, and European integration. As a result, the initial division among parties that separated the successors of the Communist Party from the anti-communist formations was abandoned within a progressive party system closure characterized by both a predictable competition for government offices and highly regular inter-party relations (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2021). More specifically, as illustrated by Casal Bértoa and Enyedi (2021), the relevance of predictable relations among a stable set of political parties is connected to the evidence that a low number of political parties, supposedly organizationally stable and functioning in a nonpolarized political environment, facilitates the process of party system institutionalization. Contrariwise, fragmented and polarized party systems provide a fertile breeding ground for the development of irreconcilable views on how politics should be governed coupled with diffused negative perceptual biases towards the out-parties, all of which harms the changes for democracy to be seen as the ‘only game in town’.

By 2000, the turbulent transition period was over, and the Romanian democracy started to consolidate. During this period, the scholarly literature chronicled harsh institutional clashes (such as, for example, the 2007 and 2012 referenda on the dismissal of President Traian Băsescu) and sustained attacks against the independence of the judiciary. However, it was mainly during the 2010s that the challenges to the Romanian liberal democracy became more evident. While the country temporarily looked like an exception to the rapid rise of populist (radical right) leaders and ruling parties, strands of illiberal conservatism have been documented within the civil society and the mainstream parties since the 2010s (Mărgărit 2020). Different organizations and various political entrepreneurs have voiced the need to defend traditional values and denounced multiculturalism and non-traditional family structures such as gay marriage. The 2020 Romanian general elections brought a radical right populist  party to Parliament, the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR). Beyond this electoral success, the AUR’s arrival in Romanian politics has given more visibility to the illiberal traits of politics in that country (Dragolea 2022).

Party politics has been used not only as a proxy for Romania’s democratization but also as a potential independent variable to explain the delay the transition experienced during the early 1990s, the gains registered afterwards in effecting democratization, and the occasional tensions experimented in the period that followed Romania’s acceptance into the EU (Preda 2005; Gherghina and Soare 2016). As such, this chapter aims at providing an answer to the following question: Which features make up the Romanian party politics three decades after the collapse of the communist regime? Our analysis, thus, places parties at the centre of the research on Romanian democracy by looking both at specific individual parties and at the interactions that result from inter-party competition (Sartori 2005). This focus has a double justification. First, by amending Schattschneider (2004), we acknowledge that political parties have been central in shaping Romania’s post-communist democracy and, implicitly, Romanian democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties. Second, we are interested in providing a radiography of the core of the Romanian parties and party system dynamics. For this purpose, the chapter includes traditional measurements of the nature of party politics, such as the number of parties and the distribution of electoral support across parties, together with more focused insights on how the Romanian parties first competed and then collaborated in post-communism. Huntington’s test of a peaceful alternation in government occurred in 1996, when the Democratic Convention of Romania, a loose electoral alliance of various anti-communist formations, unseated the Social Democrats, successors to the former communists. By proving that democracy is government pro tempore (Linz 1998), in other words by guaranteeing that there are no representatives elected for unlimited time and that rotation in office is a fundamental safety mechanism for controlling politicians’ behaviour, the post-1996 period put an end to the initial limbo in which Romania had been situated since the December 1989 regime change. Indeed, the 1996 elections represented nothing else but a watershed for the Romanian post-communist transition, the moment when the country became a full, albeit still flawed, democracy, as stated by Freedom House’s 1996 Freedom in the World report (Freedom in the World, 1998).

The Number of Romanian Parties

A large body of research shows that the number of parties impacts party dynamics and electoral behaviour (Rae 1971; Taagepera and Shugart 1989; Norris 2004). In line with Sartori (2005), we consider the number of parties as key in identifying the competitive configuration of Romanian party politics. The format of the party system allows us to indicate the extent to which political power in a given electoral context is fragmented or non-fragmented, dispersed, or concentrated (Sartori 2005). The assumption of the literature is that a high number of parties indicates a higher level of fragmentation in both the electoral and parliamentary arenas which generates increased complexity and intricacy in the way democratic politics can function (e.g. difficulties in forming viable governmental coalitions, limitations to the opportunities for parliamentary opposition to exert control over government, etc.) (Sartori 2005: 106). Moreover, the numerical criterion has been used to assess the dispersion—either a segmented or a polarized dispersion—of power (Sartori 2005: 112). Beyond the ongoing debates in comparative politics about the merits and vices of two versus multi-party systems, there is a consensus that extremely fragmented and polarized party systems produce intense fights that go beyond the electoral and institutional arenas, spilling over into different non-political domains. This generates not only a highly chaotic political landscape but has been empirically proved to negatively impact the survival of democracy (Casal Bértoa and Enyedi 2021).

The number of political parties that competed in the first post-communist elections was very high. Seventy-one electoral competitors fielded candidates for the lower Chamber of Deputies in 1990 and as many as 79 in 1992 (Preda and Soare 2012: 138). The number of parties that competed in elections remained high until 2004, with an average of 61.3 party lists registered between 1996 and 2004. The number of parties competing for seats in the lower chamber diminished in 2008, reaching only 29; in 2012 that number was 30. Starting with 2016, the number increased to 35 in 2016 and 41 in 2020. While these numbers refer to the electoral arena, it is important to mention that only a tiny minority of them succeed in getting to Parliament. Note also that with the exception of the 1990 elections, the number of parties and alliances is similar in both Chambers of Parliament. With reference to the lower Chamber from 16 parliamentary parties and alliances in 1990, the number abruptly went down to 7 in 1992, 6 in 1996, 5 in 2000, 4 in 2004, 2008, and 2012; it slightly went up in 2016 with 6 parties and diminished in 2020 to 5 parties and alliances (Preda and Soare 2012). These fluctuations in terms of the number of parties that succeeded in obtaining parliamentary representations are strongly dependent on the way in which the Romanian legislators have been shaping and amending the electoral laws and/or the party laws, including party funding legislation. Over the years, the electoral legislation raised entry barriers through legal thresholds, nomination requirements, or radical changes in the electoral formulas, while party laws have further accentuated, the obstacles through rigid registration, membership, and/or activity criteria (Popescu and Soare 2017). Interestingly, until the 2015 amendment of the party law, the rhetorical justification has regularly been that of fight fragmentation, simplifying the choices available to voters and increasing government stability (Popescu and Soare 2017). However, there is also evidence that the restraining effects in terms of party fragmentation needed to be assessed in parallel with the increased citizen disconnect and disaffection from politics. For reason of space, it is impossible to cover the dynamics characterizing the impact on other types of competitions (e.g. local elections, presidential elections, European elections). This analysis remains focused exclusively on the parliamentary arena and takes into account the lower Chamber only.

This rough measurement tells only an incomplete and imprecise part of the story. It tends to overestimate the number of political parties, and, most importantly, fails to grasp which political formations are relevant in terms of party competition. In other words, the number of parties competing in an election or those having obtained parliamentary representation provides a snapshot of all the competitors with no indication on their capacity to affect the tactics of inter-party competition. This rough counting rule has been famously challenged by Sartori (2005) who claimed the need to consider the relevant parties only, namely the parties that are characterized by either coalition potential or power of intimidation. To wit, there are cases where different parties compete in elections and successfully obtain parliamentary seats, but only one particular party, such as the Liberal Democrats in Japan or Fianna Fáil in Ireland, is able to win a stable majority of parliamentary seats. The number of rough parties in elections or parliament obscures the predominance of one party over all the others. The challenge remains with regard to how to identify which are the relevant parties. The scholarly literature has argued in favour of a measurement that took into account the parties’ relative size, and Laakso and Taagepera’s (1979) effective number of parties has become one of the most used measures of fragmentation (Lijphart 1994). The effective number of legislative parties (ENPP) and/or the effective number of electoral parties (ENEP) are widely seen as reliable ways to weigh the relevance of parties. They allow us to assess in a more precise way how many parties are in a party system in a given election, weighted according to their size (measured as the proportion of seats by the ENPP and the proportion of votes by the ENEP).

If we consider the post-1996 electoral competition, Fig. 7.1 allows us to trace over time the change in the number of effective parties. A temporary contraction effect of ‘time’ can be seen in the 2000–2016 period. A U-shaped pattern is observable across the seven mapped elections for the electoral arena, in other words regarding the relevant parties in the different electoral competitions. While the literature agrees that a higher number of parties can be interpreted as a positive sign of issue diversity in politics and capacity for political renewal, the high effective number of parties contesting the Romanian elections in 1996, 2000, and 2020 can also indicate that voters had difficulty to understand which formation could better represent their interests. The distribution is flatter when it comes to parties that gained representation in Parliament. Across the 1996–2020 legislative elections, Romania has had an average effective number of parliamentary parties equal to 3.6, that is, almost 4 relevant parties obtained parliamentary seats and as such were able to affect the tactics of party competition. Following Mainwaring and Scully (1995), this average number corresponds to Sartori’s category of limited pluralism. Interestingly, with an ENPP of 2.2, the 2012 legislature can approximate the two-party paradigm. Once again around two parties only can be considered as relevant for the inter-party relations in Romanian politics in this period.

Fig. 7.1

(Source Casal Bértoa [2023])

Evolution of ENEP and ENPP in Romania (1996–2000)

Overall, the data shows that while the format of the party system has been shrinking between 2000 and 2016, the level of concentration diminished in the most recent legislative elections. As such, at the time of this writing, Romanian party politics is only partially aligned with what scholars identified as patterns of extreme pluralism diffusion in post-communist settings (Casal Bértoa 2013). From a strictly numerical perspective, the most common features of the Romanian post-communist party system suggest a relatively stable political competition. From 1996 to 2016, a limited number of genuine extra-parliamentary born new parties entered the legislative arena. Two so-called explosive new parties, whose parliamentary entry was equated to an electoral earthquake (Emanuele and Sikk 2021), were the Save Romania Union and the Alliance for the Union of Romanians, which entered Parliament in 2016 and 2020, respectively. The USR obtained 8.9% of the vote in the 2016 elections, and four years later further improved its performance by unexpectedly garnering 15.4% of the vote for the lower Chamber of Deputies. The AUR was the big surprise of the 2020 election; the party received 9.2% of the vote for the Chamber and has gained ground in the polls ever since, ranking second in the electorate's preferences during the summer of 2023 (www.hotnews.ro 2023). The electoral success registered in the 2016 elections by the People’s Party—Dan Diaconescu, a populist formation created by television personality Dan Diaconescu, allows us to categorize that formation as a meteoric party (Emanuele and Sikk 2021) which, after a solid electoral performance (9.5% of the vote for the lower Chamber in 2012), dramatically declined in successive elections and eventually disappeared from the political scene by the next elections. The vast majority of the other new parties in Romania can be labelled flop parties, characterized by a low share of the vote and a more or less rapid disintegration in the extra-parliamentary arena (Emanuele and Sikk 2021).

Party splits have remained a frequent phenomenon across all post-communist legislatures. Splits have affected all mainstream parties. Some of these formations have registered some temporary success. This is the case of the Liberal Reformist Party, a splinter of the historical National Liberal Party that was founded in 2014. One year later, the Liberal Reformist Party merged with the tiny Conservative Party (PC) in order to form the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats (ALDE). In the first election in which it participated after that merger, organized in 2016, the ALDE gathered 5.6% of the vote for the lower Chamber of Deputies and joined the government led by the Social Democrat Party (PSD) as a junior partner. In 2019, the ALDE joined the parliamentary opposition and the following year it merged with a small PSD splinter party called PRO Romania. In the legislative elections organized a couple of months later, the new formation fell just short of the 5% threshold needed to enter Parliament. Most of the other similar splinter groups failed to maintain their parliamentary representation and rapidly fell into obscurity. The short life-span of these new parties is well documented by scholars (Pedersen 1982). Beyond the difficulties related to establishing a social base (Bolleyer 2013), the limited viability enjoyed by the new parties in the Romanian political arena suggests that political entrepreneurs exhibit bounded rationality, in the sense that most of the new attempts to renew the supply of political parties fail to take into account factors such as the specificities of the electoral competitions, the strength of the rump parties, or the institutional constraints that new formations must face, among others (Emanuele and Sikk 2021: 890). A by-effect of this stable menu of parliamentary political parties coupled is the continuous presence of the major establishment parties, that is, the social-democrats (PSD) and the liberals (PNL), in different combinations of governmental coalitions. This limited alteration has increased the odds that Romanian electors vote for new anti-establishment parties when they are not abstaining from participating in elections. Indeed, since 2012, the successful Romanian new political parties have shared a strong anti-establishment rhetoric that met the critical attitude of citizens towards political parties and political elites.

The Institutional Framework

The literature agrees that the number of parties that compete in any given election is dependent on the legal context. For most scholars, the electoral system, the party regulation, and the form of government are among the most useful lenses that provide a finer-grained analysis of the format of the party system. Scholars have assessed the effects of electoral systems on post-communist party politics (Ishiyama 1999; Bielasiak 2002). Although with little consensus, some of this literature showed that proportional representation had been more effective than the plurality system in constraining the number of parties when a legal threshold had been used (Moser 1999; Birch et al. 2002). This assessment applies to Romania as well.

Romania initially adopted an electoral system based on closed-list proportional representation without a national threshold. The legal framework designed in 1990 was subject to several amendments that introduced more restrictive nomination requirements and increased thresholds. Under these newer electoral rules, the Romanian political parties were given a major role in managing political recruitment (Ștefan-Scalat 2004), in particular, and political agendas more generally. The proportional system has been increasingly criticized for encouraging (electoral and parliamentary) fragmentation and for failing to provide stable majority governments. After five elections managed by closed-list proportional representation, Romania adopted an original mixed-member proportional electoral system in 2008 (Gherghina and Jiglau 2012). The reform of the electoral system was strongly supported by the media, the non-governmental organizations acting in the field of election and democracy, and the main parliamentary parties (Giugal et al. 2020). The process of personalizing the electoral competition was supposed to reinforce the link between the candidates and their electoral districts and, therefore, to lead to both increased individual accountability on the part of the representatives and better representation of various electoral groups and preferences (Chiru 2021). In the context of increased electoral apathy (Tufiş 2014), the reformed electoral system was also thought to lead to a higher turnout (Gherghina and Jiglau 2012; Giugal et al. 2020). Beyond the localization of electoral campaigns (Popescu and Chiru 2020), the overall effects remained mixed (Giugal et al. 2020; Chiru 2021). While the reformed electoral system functioned well in 2008, four years later, scholars and experts strongly criticized the distortions it produced and, in particular, the high number of ‘overhang’ seats representing around 20% of the total number of elected members (Giugal et al. 2020).

By 2015, this electoral system was abandoned and replaced by the previous closed-list proportional system. The reaffirmation of the proportional principle was the result of both conservative tendencies among the political élite and increased civil society pressures for a renewal of the much-despised political class. The legislature adjusted the restrictive provisions of the party regulation accordingly (Iancu and Soare 2020). Until the 2015 reform, a party needed at least 25,000 members at registration, with no fewer than 700 persons in at least 18 counties (equivalent to one-third of Romania’s 41 counties), including the capital city of Bucharest. These rigid requirements reflected not only the mainstream parties’ belief that it was in the interest of democracy to maintain a small number of viable political alternatives and facilitate the choices of the citizens but also their search for government stability and their implicit control of fragmentation (Popescu and Soare 2017; 2018). In parallel, different non-governmental organizations intensively campaigned on the need to dismantle institutional barriers and allow new political actors to provide fresh alternatives (Iancu and Soare 2020). In 2015, the party legislation was radically changed to allow a political formation to be founded by just three members drawn from any geographical area. This change explains the rise in the number of electoral competitors in the 2016 and 2020 elections, as well as the entry of two relevant new parties, the USR and the AUR. In both cases, the parties’ launching platforms denounced representative ‘politics as usual,’ the cartelization of politics (that is the tendency for the political mainstream to form a cartel that not only keeps contentious policy questions off the political agenda but also employs the resources of the state to limit political competition), the pervasive political corruption, and the extensive use of patronage and clientelism that affected Romanian politics (Dragoman 2021; Soare and Tufiș 2023). While the USR was able to invoke the expertise of its leaders beyond the political realm in societal activisms or different successful professional carriers, the AUR focused on the promise to revive politics and portrayed itself as fundamentally distinct from traditional parties in content and style.

Table 7.1, inspired by Borbáth (2019: 221), presents the election results obtained by the main Romanian parties during the period 1996–2020. We grouped parties into ideological blocs. We are aware that this type of aggregation diminishes the precision of our data, but we consider that it provides a more accurate overview of the post-1996 competition. The data shows not only the strength of the left-wing bloc, generally led by the PSD but also the fragmentation of the right-wing bloc. 35 years after communism, the Romanian successor party is one of the most successful stories of political endurance. However, this is less an issue of left values/culture and more the by-effect of the enormous advantage given by the connections with the organizational and human network of the former Communist Party in the 1990s. The data further shows the stability of the party representing the Hungarian ethnic minority (the UDMR), together with the increased visibility of anti-establishment platforms in the period that followed Romania’s acceptance into the EU. Note that, over the years, voters’ participation steadily declined (except for the 2012 elections) from over 76% in 1996 to less than a third of eligible voters in 2020. A similar trend can also be witnessed in the case of presidential elections, underlying citizens’ disaffection with party politics. After the enthusiasm for the 1990s elections when the political limitations under communism were still vivid, post-communist voters—and younger voters especially—have progressively lost interest in politics. Disillusioned or disinterested, this shows that Romanian politics has progressively lost touch with the citizenry.

Table 7.1 The electoral results of the main Romanian political parties by blocs (1996–2020)

Beyond these descriptive aspects, it is possible to assess in a more rigorous way the impact of the changes in the legal provisions regulating the formation and registration of political parties and the electoral competition by looking at the presence of stable and predictable patterns of interactions among political parties. The rationale behind this is that although the stability of the party system is not sufficient for successful democratization (Morlino 1998), stable inter-party interactions are supposed to foster more effective representation of the interests and to produce predictability in the context of government formation (Mainwaring and Zoco 2007). By adapting the index developed by Pedersen (1979) and relying on Chiaramonte and Emanuele (2017), we calculate the volatility caused by the parties’ entry into and exit from the political system (Volatility by Regeneration, RegV) and the volatility generated by shifts occurring when voters change their electoral preferences between existing parties (Volatility by Alteration, AltV). Given the fragmentation noticeable in the Romanian electoral arena, we took into consideration all parties that managed to cross a 1% threshold in the legislative elections (at the Chamber). The 1996 elections are considered the initial reference point and we covered the following six elections for the Chamber of Deputies. For each election, we calculated three measures: RegV, AltV, and Total Volatility (Table 7.2). For the period of reference, the value of Total Volatility ranges from a minimum of 13.2 (in 2012)—which can be equated to a medium level of volatility—to a maximum of 29.2 (in 2000), which indicates a high instability. For comparison, the average Total Volatility registered in Western Europe was 12.76 between 1992 and 2015 (Chiaramonte and Emanuele 2017). While in the elections held at the beginning of the democratization process, the Total Volatility was aligned with the post-communist instability documented by scholars (Emanuele et al. 2020), it then registered a sharp decline in the 2004 elections, more in line with the volatility scores observed in Western Europe (Emanuele et al. 2020). Successive elections became increasingly volatile. If we look at the internal components of the volatility, we observe that the electoral volatility in post-communist Romania was mainly driven by the Volatility by Alteration (AltV). On average, the volatility resulting from new party entry and old party exit (RegV) is 4.8 for the six elections covered, while the AltV is about four times higher. Moreover, while the RegV increases, the AltV decreases over time. This echoes our earlier analysis in the sense that there is a potential for instability linked to the renewal of the electoral arena since 2012, but the total volatility is primarily driven by vote shifts among established parties.

Table 7.2 Electoral volatility in Romania (2000–2020)

The table shows that Romanian politics is slightly stabilizing; the electoral competition has become less unstable and unpredictable, although the vote shifts among established parties have decreased, testifying to the Romanian parties’ limited success in creating more stable loyalties with the voters.

Last but not least, scholars have documented the influence of the form of government, more specifically of the strength of presidencies, on party dynamics (Lijphart 1999; Sartori 1994). In particular, in semi-presidential settings, political entrepreneurs are considered more likely to build their own parties in order to compete for the presidential office (Elgie and Moestrup 2008). Incumbent presidents find incentives to launch new parties when their original ones oppose their agenda. Hence, they endorse new parties in order to reinforce their parliamentary support and secure a second mandate (Tavits 2009; Raunio and Sedelius 2020). All this is supposed to diminish the ability of political formations to link voters’ interests and values to government policy making, and more generally to produce regular reshuffling of the party systems (Passarelli 2020; Iancu and Tacea 2023).

The directly elected President has been seen as a major political scapegoat in the numerous political crises that marked the Romanian post-communist democracy, as illustrated by the clashes between the President, on the one hand, and the Prime Minister or Parliament, on the other hand, in 2007 and 2012 (Tanasescu 2008; Bucur 2012; Gherghina and Miscoiu 2013). While public surveys suggested that Romanians tended to trust their Presidents more than the political parties in the first two decades of post-communism (Tufiş 2014), the situation changed in the 2010s. Recent surveys place the Presidency among the least trusted institutions, together with political parties, the government, and Parliament (Barometrul Civic din Romania 2023). Similarly, while presidential elections have constantly registered higher turnout than parliamentary elections, the 2019 presidential election signalled a significant drop. On this basis, some scholars chronicled the constant temptation for political entrepreneurs to start new parties in order to target the Presidential office (Gherghina and Soare 2021). Others looked into how the Romanian semi-presidential system has blurred accountability by allowing political parties to shift the blame for policy failures between the President and the Prime Minister (Borbáth 2019). This explains, in part, the support President Basescu offered to the People's Movement Party (PMP) since 2013 when his original parliamentary majority opposed the presidential policy preferences in his second mandate (2009–2014). Thus, in line with available scholarship (Passarelli 2020), the relevance of the institutional figure (the President) explains the Romanian parties’ permanent quest for leaders capable of winning the presidential office. At an individual level, the parties’ presidential candidates become alternative actors connecting the parties with the electorate; they enable their parties to mobilize voters who might not be willing to support them otherwise. At a systemic level, the Romanian President weighs in the balance of multipartyism. The President easily shapes the party or bloc of parties supporting his candidacy (Romania has had only male presidents to date); he can also change the patterns of interactions between parties, as illustrated by the ad hoc coalitions mobilized for and against the two referenda on the dismissal of President Traian Băsescu (Gherghina and Soare 2016).

The Content of the Competition

The quantitative dimension of the interaction patterns detailed above tells us little about how political parties have been cooperating and competing or how the party system has been structured in terms of policy positions in Romania. As scholars acknowledge, political parties are supposed to adopt identifiable positions on one or more ideological dimensions and to provide voters with a choice among a variety of agendas. On this basis, different scholars suggested that (Western) party systems have a clearly identifiable structure of party competition regarding the economic left/right and the socio-cultural GAL-TAN (Green/Alternative/ Libertarian–Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist) dimensions (Kriesi et al. 2012; Dalton 2018). The early literature on post-communist politics agreed that post-communist party systems lacked openly articulated group identities and the competition was extremely open and unpredictable (Mair 1997). By the end of the 1990s, the post-communist party systems progressively abandoned the post-communist meta-opposition that pitted the successors of the Communist Party against ideologically heterogeneous anti-communist coalitions. Publicly discredited, the former Communist Parties adopted a peculiar strategy for gaining credibility with the voters, the national political competitors, and the international community; across the region, these parties promoted fiscal austerity and tighter budgets, whereas their main competitors, the anti-communist rightist parties, appeared more open to social spending (Grzymała-Busse 2002; Tavits and Letki 2009). Across the region, the linkages between parties and voters echoed less programmatic dimensions and more clientelistic relationships (Kopecký and Spirova 2011). In general, the political competition remains fluid, with parties competing on nonpolicy issues such as anti-corruption, or on personal ad hoc appeals that allow political entrepreneurs to start new parties (Gherghina et al. 2021). Since the 2000s, cultural issues have become more prominent than socioeconomic considerations (Hutter and Kriesi 2019).

In the Romanian case, the political competition initially concerned a unique dimension, the relation to democracy and pluralism. The hegemonic National Salvation Front (FSN), the successor to the Communist Party that was later rebaptized into the Social Democrat Party (PSD), strategically used a Manichean frame to define the relation between multipartyism and democracy as the only platform able to express popular interests and represented the will of the people, while the other competitors, mostly associations, parties, and alliances connected to the anti-communist camp, were accused of undermining the interests of the common people. Intuitively, the division into ‘us vs them’ triggered both positive feelings towards the in-group and, above all, the leader Ion Iliescu, and strong negative feelings towards the (anti-communist) out-group. By the beginning of 2000, as elsewhere in the region, the Romanian parties aligned on a single axis with one pole joining left-wing economics and cultural traditionalism and another combining market liberalism and cultural openness (Vachudova and Hooghe 2009). The parties originating from the FSN faced a strong legitimacy crisis. To overcome their pariah status in national and international politics, both the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (the future PSD) and the Democratic Party (the future Democratic Liberal Party, eventually merged into the National Liberal Party in 2014) committed to a capitalist democracy at the end of the 1990s. In the 2000s, the Romanian parties started to compete for votes on valence issues like anti-corruption and transparency. Craciun (2017) rightly shows that at the time this dimension was disconnected from the citizens’ priorities which related more to jobs, wages, working conditions, social services, and poverty.

To better understand how party competition is reflected in the positions of parties, we looked at the characteristics and positions of parties as documented by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. We focused our descriptive analysis on two ideological dimensions. We considered the economic left–right dimension related to a party’s positioning on redistribution, taxation, and the role of the state in the economy, as well as on the socio-cultural dimension that distinguishes between GAL (green, alternative, libertarianism) and TAN (traditionalism, authoritarianism, and nationalism). The gist of the story can be summarized as such: the Romanian party competition mainly involves a division between a camp consisting of strong economically left traditionalists that brings together most of the leftist bloc, and the radical right populist parties, on the one hand, and a relatively thin group of right-wing and economically progressive forces, on the other. Since 2012, an anti-establishment camp has become visible. However, far from being a homogenous group of parties that denounce politics as usual and the corrupt establishment, this camp is further divided between the economically left traditionalists (gathered around the short-lived People’s Party—Dan Diaconescu [PP-DD]) and the economically right progressists, represented by the Union Save Romania (USR). The descriptive statistics show that the relative weight of the GAL-TAN dimension gradually increases over time, with several TAN parties driving this change. These results demonstrate the increased politicization of cultural issues and, more generally, the illiberal appeal of the right (Plattner 2019). If we look more closely at the evolution of individual party positions, summarized in Tables 7.3a and 7.3b, we can better appreciate the shift towards more TAN over time, which is particularly evident in the case of the PSD (after 2008), but generally characterizes most of the other parties. This phenomenon is so widespread that, in 2016, among the coded parties we found only the USR in the bottom half of the quadrant (Fig. 7.2). At the same time, the shifts in the parties’ economic left–right leaning were limited, and largely followed the traditional left/right divide or the regional trend of anti-market  and radical right populist parties. The dataset does not cover the 2020 elections, but we can assume that the competition pattern did not vary significantly. On the contrary, the performance of the AUR seems to reinforce the finding that the divide is increasingly shaped by cultural issues and not so much by economic positions.

Table 7.3 Evolution of economic left–right party positions (2000–2016)

Table 7.4 Evolution of GAL-TAN party positions (2000–2016)

Fig. 7.2

(Source Chapel Hill Expert Survey)

Economic left–right and GAL-TAN Party positions (election year in parentheses)

Conclusion

Important societal changes have marked post-communist Romania since December 1989, and they have also affected party politics. Since the earliest post-communist election was organized in the early 1990s, the initial fragmentation diminished, with Romania achieving political consolidation as most countries in the region, although there was a slight increase in the number of effective parties in the last two elections (held in 2016 and 2020). This numerical stabilization is supported by a decrease in total volatility. There is also evidence of a potential for instability due to the recent higher levels of regeneration generated by the rise of new and, in some cases, stable parties.

In the case of Romania, traditional measurements of volatility cannot be taken as an indicator of stability. Electoral volatility, calculated as the difference in vote share between elections, does not cover the creation between elections of new parties in parliament that ally or merge with mainstream parties (like the National Union for the Progress of Romania UNPR) before the upcoming elections or simply cease to exist. Romania has a relatively close and stable party system, but between elections, the parliamentary dynamics show fragmentation and instability. Thanks to the malleability of parties represented in Parliament, Romania, as Hungary, held no early general elections since 1992.

At the same time, the competition has progressively resembled Western European patterns. The prevalence of TAN parties represents a challenge for the stability of liberal values in a region where the sources of emulation are robust (e.g. see the case of Fidesz in Hungary). Romania’s post-communist party politics, like a pendulum, depends on the quality of its democracy. While for almost three decades the pendulum has swung towards the European values enshrined by Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union, it is now influenced by the appeal of a traditional social order that brings it back to the grey limbo of the early 1990s. Against this backdrop, the outcome of the 2024 elections remains uncertain, with the AUR becoming the second strongest party, according to the polls. This might prove dangerous, since local, European, legislative, and presidential elections are all due to be held in the same year for the first time since Romania joined the EU.