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Liberal leader Klaus Iohannis won a second presidential term in Romania on Sunday (November 24th), according to two polls taken out of the polls, with a broad lead that marks the will of voters to defend the rule of law and the fight against corruption.
This 60-year-old former physics professor garnered between 64.8% and 66.5% of the vote, according to polls, inflicting the most severe defeat on a candidate of the main leftist party since the fall of the communist regime there is thirty years.
Viorica Dancila, leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and opponent of the outgoing head of state, would total between 33.5% and 35.2% of the vote. Ms. Dancila led the government for almost two years before being overthrown in October by Parliament.
The PSD, a left-wing party with populist and eurosceptic overtones that has dominated Romanian political life since 1990, is paying the price for its growing unpopularity, linked in particular to its attempts to weaken anti-corruption justice and the scandals affecting many of its elected officials.
The social-democratic party, which emerged from the former communist party, has in recent years been accused of undermining the rule of law and isolating Romania on the European scene.
Klaus Iohannis, favorite of the vote, was supported by the tens of thousands of Romanians who have been on the streets since 2017 to denounce the justice reforms led by the left.
After the motion of censure against Mrs. Dancila, a center-right cabinet under the leadership of the National Liberal Party (PNL), from which Mr. Iohannis is born, took the reins of the government. But the PSD remains a majority in parliament and the next legislative elections are scheduled for the end of 2020.
A country that changes
During his almost three years of turbulent cohabitation with the left, Klaus Iohannis engaged in a war of attrition to impede the reform of the judicial system carried out by the PSD.
Also criticized by the European Commission, this reform has cost the PSD over a million votes, said sociologist Alin Teodorescu.
The social democrats have even lost popularity in their bastions of the countryside. Emigration and access to the internet, which allowed Romanians to discover Western Europe, have changed their electoral preferences, to the detriment of the PSD, says anthropologist Vintila Mihailescu.
Two weeks ago, Mrs Dancila had received less than 3% of the votes among the large Romanian diaspora. Some four million Romanians live abroad, as the country's entry into the EU in 2007 accelerated the emigration of a population in search of better living conditions.
The seventh most populous country in the European Union with 19.4 million inhabitants, Romania has great disparities between urban centers, whose standard of living is close to European standards, and rural areas, among the poorest from the continent. Nearly one in two Romanian lives in the countryside.
In recent years, Romania has recorded strong economic growth rates (7% in 2017 and 4.1% in 2018), boosted by increases in pensions and salaries in the public sector granted by the PSD. But these largesse raised the concern of the EU and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), who warned against an explosion of the deficit.
(With AFP)