A friend of mine in Norway is married to a Romanian woman (there is a large Romanian expat community in Oslo) and he keeps close tabs on events in Romania. Here is a report he emailed to me last night about the elections there. I thought it might be of interest to some of us.
At the moment there is a landslide election in Romania. The guy nobody believed would win is apparently taking the game home with a vengeance.
The current prime minister, Victor Ponta, the darling of the establishment, and leader of what they call the Social Democrat Party (sorry, but as a Nordic I had to add that snide remark, because they are nothing of the kind), used his position to run one of the most dirty and (unfortunately to him) most transparent election campaigns in European resent history. (We’re talking “Obama is going to have death panels” level and worse.) I addition to bribing people with food and making all the Romanian othrodox priests tells their flocks how to vote...
The apparent winner, Klaus Iohannis, is an ethnic German –a Transylvania Saxon, whose family has a 400 yrs history in the country. He is a university professor in physics and was mayor of the city Sibiu. During his period the city was for one cultural capital of the EU and it looked the part (it did, i have been there).
This night was the second round, to sort between the two candidates emerging with largest vote in the first round. The thing is that in the first round, there were snags to actively prevent the diaspora (really a big part of the more educated part of the populace) from being able to vote. –For one thing this year the diaspora could basically only vote at the embassies, not also at the consulates like before (in large contries like Germany ), and the time limit was restrained. Some embassies had too few booths or too few ballots, or closed the doors when hundreds of people were still in line outside, AND called the local French and German police to chase the voters away. Thousands of members of the electorate were not allowed to vote.
The electorate home or away didn’t take kindly to this. This time around the young Romanians (who have been very politically passive for many years) turned out in force. And the diaspora voted in larger numbers than before, and if not actively for Iohannis, then at last against Ponta. Unfortunately there were still hundreds if not thousands of people violently prevented from voting by local police in Paris in and München because the embassies/consulats didn’t have the capacity (something which was obviously intentional), but even without the diaspora Iohannis seems to have a 10 % lead. In the diaspora Iohannis seems to come out at 70 %.
We’ll see in the morning how it pans out, but this could be the first time the Romanian electorate puts in charge someone who can do something with the immensly corrupt system in place now. (The “revolution” of 1989 (even the Romanians refer it to with “”) was a palace coup using the general populace as pawns.)
Now I have to go to bed...
Cheers
Torfinn