[ad_1]
Monday 07 December 2020
After the electoral defeat
Romania’s head of government resigns
Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban resigns after his party’s defeat in the parliamentary elections. Observers, however, speculate on who or what may have prompted Orban to make the decision.
The bourgeois Prime Minister of Romania, Ludovic Orban, has resigned as head of government. The reason he cited was the defeat of his PNL party in the parliamentary elections, in which the opposition Social Democratic party PSD came in first place on Sunday. “I don’t hold onto any office,” he said. However, as president of the PNL, he wanted to participate in the next negotiations on a governing coalition.
The media speculated that President Klaus Iohannis Orban had urged his resignation. Iohannis, who has the exclusive right to propose a head of government to parliament, is fighting for a NLP-led coalition with the small eco-liberal USR-Plus and the Hungarian UDMR party. With Orban’s departure, USR-Plus in particular should make an alliance with the PNL acceptable, especially since this small party had been emphatically critical of the prime minister personally, observers said.
Neither party obtained an absolute majority in the elections. According to the projections of the House of Representatives, the PSD reaches 29.79 percent, followed by the bourgeois ruling party PNL with 25.01 percent. The USR plus reached 14.84 percent and the UDMR 6.63 percent. This was announced by the central elections office in Bucharest after the votes were counted in 84.84 per cent of the polling stations.
In the Senate, the upper house of parliament, the distribution of votes was similar: PSD 30.18 percent, PNL 25.38 percent, USR plus 15.29 percent, UDMR 6.80 percent. Surprisingly, the new ultra-national AUR party (Alianta pentru Unirea Romanilor – Alliance for the Union of Romanians) became the fourth largest force in parliament. AUR was only founded in September 2019 and was ignored by the main media in the country. At the latest count, he received 8.17 percent of the votes for the House of Representatives and 8.48 for the Senate.
