Romanian president Traian Basescu won a second term in office on December 6, but his slim margin of victory over Social Democrat leader Mircea Geoana in the run-off offers little hope that the political crisis that has hamstrung Romanian government is over.

Basescu won 50.3 per cent of the votes, election authorities said, with the turnout exceeding expectations at 58 per cent. The decisive edge came from the voting stations abroad, where Basescu got 115 800 votes, compared to Geoana’s 31 000 votes.

The results illustrate the polarising effect that Basescu has at the end of his first presidential term, when all of his opponents in the first round of elections threw their support behind Geoana in the run-off, but also Basescu’s knack for prevailing against all odds.

Three of four exit polls on election day gave Geoana the victory after polls closed in Romania, while voting in Western Europe and the US was still under way. The dramatic turnaround and the allegations during the campaign that Basescu would try to rig the vote has prompted Social Democrats to challenge the results in the country’s constitutional court, but such an outcome is seen as unlikely.

Geoana, who had claimed victory on election night, refused to concede defeat on December 8 saying that "the will of the people has been substituted".

Prime Minister Emil Boc, whose Liberal Democrats never wavered in their support for Basescu, the party’s former leader, countered to say that other parties should move on. "Maintaining the electoral rhetoric after the end of the campaign and after the central electoral bureau presented the results is only damaging Romania and Romanians," he said.

Cabinet questions
Boc’s cabinet remains in office on a caretaker basis, having lost a motion of no confidence in parliament in October. Basescu has refused to nominate the mayor of Sibiu, Klaus Johannis, who had wide support in parliament, as prime minister.

Basescu’s first nomination, central bank adviser Lucian Croitoru, was rejected by parliament, which is expected to do the same with the president’s second choice, Liviu Negoita, the mayor of one of Bucharest’s six districts.

The uncertainty has already prompted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to withdraw a mission, which was due to assess the state of Romania’s economy in October. The IMF provides the bulk of the $26.5 billion international bailout that Bucharest negotiated in May 2009, agreeing to public administration reforms and government spending cuts in exchange for the money needed to cover the bulging budget deficit.

The IMF has said that it expected Romania to miss its budget deficit target because of the late implementation of key reforms and insufficient spending cuts.
Parliament has given Boc’s cabinet the power to draft and table a budget bill, but the Liberal Democrats would need the support of another major party to push the bill through. Such support, however, would come with strings attached.

Should parliament reject Negoita’s nomination, Basescu would have the necessary legal grounds to call snap elections, but with the current legislature only one year into its term, the odds that it would give Liberal Democrats a decisive edge in the two houses of parliament appear slim.

Building consensus?
Fostering unity is not Basescu’s strongest suit. In fact, his highest public approval ratings came at the time when he was embroiled in a very public war of words with former prime minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu in 2005/07, which culminated in the splintering of Tariceanu’s National Liberal party and the defection in large numbers of party members to
Basescu’s Liberal Democrats, who found themselves in opposition.

Basescu’s clash with Tariceanu was not the first time he torpedoed a cabinet – in 1998, as transport minister, he played the key role in the resignation of then prime minister Victor Ciorbea, who was forced to step down in order to maintain peace in the centre-right coalition then in power.

Now Basescu’s best chance to solve the political crisis would be to broker the deal that would bring the National Liberals, who are ideologically close to his Liberal Democrats, back into the cabinet. The Liberal Democrats passed on such a scenario after the December 2008 elections, opting instead to govern with the Social Democrats, a coalition that fell apart nine months later.

At the time, Basescu’s party felt that the National Liberals’ demand to nominate the prime minister was asking too much. A year later, new National Liberal leader Crin Antonescu, who finished third in the presidential election with 20 per cent and backed Geoana in the run-off, shows no sign of relenting.

Citing the Liberal Democrats’ track record, Antonescu said on December 8 that the mistrust engendered by the Liberal Democrats could only be overcome if Basescu’s party relinquished the prime minister position and key offices in parliament.

Basescu now finds himself in the unenviable position of having to reach out to political opponents that he has alienated during his first term in office if Romania is to quickly have a new government and resume reforms. Whether he has the will to pursue such a course, only time will tell.