Recently, the number of political parties is constantly growing. In 1990, about 80 parties were registered, then their number increased to 155 in 1992. Later, due to legislative restrictions, primarily related to the increase in the number of founding members to 10,000 from at least 15 counties in 1996 and reaching 25,000 people from 18 counties in 2003, their number declined. In 2012, 28 games were still registered. Electoral reform that took place in 2015 as a result of protests during the 2014 presidential election resulted in a significant reduction in the number of founding members to three. Thus, the number of parties has increased to more than 200 in recent years.

The debate in the special parliamentary committee created to amend the legislation brought back to the discussion the fear of the “classic” political parties to greatly increase the number of new parties, as in the “90s”. Some parliamentarians did not hesitate to say that they do not want us to have real “phone books” as ballot papers in the elections. In fact, representatives of some major political parties do not seem to be very comfortable with the idea of ​​diversity and competition. Although the changes of 2015 were very positive for the development of democracy at the local level, it remains to be seen to what extent political parties at the local or regional level are sustainable and able to become real competition to several large parties with national representation.

Even if the law is much more permissive, it does not in itself reflect the ideas of the local party. In fact, this term does not even appear in the law. Although parties can be created much more easily, they are just as easily disintegrated. The law stipulates that parties that do not run independently or in an alliance in two consecutive campaigns, except for the presidential one, and do not provide at least 75 electoral districts in the case of local elections, respectively, a full list of candidates in at least one electoral district or candidates in at least 3 constituencies, in the case of parliamentary elections, they can be canceled at the request of the Ministry of Public Affairs. 75 constituencies are roughly a district. Some parties are already participating in such procedures at the Bucharest Court and are at risk of being dissolved – for example, the Party of Free People. It is likely that some of these cases will be challenged in the Constitutional Court. From the AEP data on the application of sanctions, we see that five parties have been written off: the Party of White National Action, the Party of Justice, Dignity, National Solidarity, the Party of Socialist Environmentalists of Romania, the Party of Re:Start Romania and “Nashi”. Romanian party Alliance. Alimpeshti Civic Party was in the stage of self-dissolution. According to the Court Portal, the “Movement for Medzhidia” party also announced its self-dissolution. And most likely, the list is incomplete and is constantly being supplemented.

The situation of smaller or local parties in general appears to be unstable. Data published by the Permanent Electoral Body on annual audits of political parties show that most of them do not carry out activities, revenues and expenses, publish information they are required to make public, or do not respond to AEP requests in accordance with the law. Statistics for 2022 show that 121 out of 191 controlled parties (for 2021) violated one or more norms of Art. 49 of Law 334/2006 on financing the activities of political parties and election campaigns. Article 49 stipulates that the parties must submit annual income and expenditure reports to the AEP and that they must send financial reports no later than 15 days from the date of submission to the fiscal institutions.

Statistics show us that in 2021, 56 parties received fines of 50,000 lei (the maximum fine) for the violations mentioned above. 39 of them received similar fines also for 2019-2020. PNȚCD received the largest fine – 65,000 lei – for various violations. The champion of the sanctions applied for the period 2019-2020 was Teodor Melescanu’s Party of National Power, which received a fine of 80,000 lei and a confiscation of 1.6 million lei. A brief analysis of the data shows that for similar violations of the law, some parties received warnings, while others received smaller fines. For example, the Romanian Environmental Party received 15,000 lei for violating a number of 8 articles. It should be noted that these sanctions can be challenged in court, and some parties even challenge them. Therefore, a warning or fine received from AEP is not an absolute fact, but the presence or absence of some basic information is difficult to dispute. And of course we can also discuss the rules if they are acceptable to all parties or if there are too many bureaucratic procedures.

Among the parties that have received significant fines are also some non-local or new ones that have been active in the past, such as Greater Romania, Prodemo or the National Unity Bloc Party. But most of these parties, which received fines of around €10,000, have no visible activity. Some of them don’t even have web pages or Facebook pages, or their pages are a mess. And, of course, most of these parties don’t raise 10,000 euros a year, according to general party statistics. So, we are talking about bankrupts who have more expenses than income.

AEP publishes summaries of control reports on its website and in the Official Gazette. But we are talking about 1-2 pages of somewhat abstract conclusions, from which it is not very clear what the problem is, but only describes that there was control and certain sanctions were applied. For example, 139,000 lei were confiscated at PER, but we do not know why. We don’t even know if the parties don’t keep their accounts as they should, because they can’t or don’t want to. After the recent discussions organized around amendment to Act 334 in November, the AEP agreed in principle that more extensive versions of the control reports could be published. Although we have previously requested full audit reports to really understand what the internal problems of political parties are, we have not received them, citing the age-old motivation that these documents contain personal data, we have not received them. However, we were invited to advise them on several parties that we invited to the headquarters of the institution. Publishing these full reports or extended forms on the AEP page would help us better understand why some of these parties are not working, what administrative challenges they are facing, and possibly what steps should be taken.

Parties that do not receive subsidies – that is, the vast majority – have great problems raising money. According to the data on the platform www.banipartide.ro, there are very few private donors, there are almost no big donors, and the parties also do not receive much money from members. Discussions with several consolidated parties revealed that they prefer to pressure members to submit contributions only in election years. And in any case, higher dues tend to be levied on executives or those in the highest government positions, not necessarily on rank-and-file members. But there are few opportunities for smaller parties. One of them, which I also supported, was to lower the bar at which political parties receive subsidies. According to the current law, the limit is increased: 50 mandates of the general or district councilor. AEP in the draft law sent to the Government for approval reduced the number to 10, which was still insufficient. The only parties that received subsidies for local results in the current mandate are PMP and Pro Romania, they are actually former parliamentary parties that narrowly missed out on getting into parliament with more than 4% of the vote.

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