At the end of the term in Victoria Palace and in the midst of a scandal involving money from the PNRR and special pensions, the Liberals once again launched the topic of electoral consolidation into the public space. With the polls falling, PNL leaders are calculating to retain power and remain in government next year, which is predicted to be disastrous for the party led by the Nicolae Chuke-Lucian Bode tandem.

The idea is not new, Hotnews.ro wrote about it last December and at the beginning of March this year.

Now the sources also have scenarios: combining local elections with European parliamentary elections, local elections with parliamentary elections, or parliamentary elections with the first round of the presidency. However, according to HotNews.ro sources, the bet actually consists in the merger of local and parliamentarians, the other two options have either minimal chances – the European parliaments must be organized in May-June, before the term of the mayors expires. – or they do not bring any benefit to the PNL, as in the case of the merger of parliamentarians with presidential ones.

Nicolae Chuke officially says: “There are three lines of elections, only three can be discussed in such a reshuffle, so now there is no other solution than one of the three. We will discuss and see what experts on the ground from each side will tell us.”

Why the PNL insists on the consolidation of elections

The stake in combining local and parliamentary seats is to save the PNL from electoral disaster and give the party a chance to negotiate power next year with the PSD, given that the liberals want a continuation of the alliance with the Social Democrats.

The first election test in 2024 under the unchanged calendar is the elections to the European Parliament. Traditionally, with the exception of 2019, when a referendum on fairness was organized on the same day, the turnout in the elections to the European Parliament is extremely low. If until now they were dominated by mainstream parties, the situation is somewhat different. All party polls predict impressive results for AUR in next year’s European Parliament elections. George Simion’s party would surpass the PNL, with a real chance of becoming the second-ranked party in the polls after the PSD.

In this context, the return of the PNL can only be registered in local elections. The PNL has an advantage over the AUR, it has more mayors who are the engines of the party in elections. Under these conditions, a merger with the parliamentarians would give the PNL an advantage. If the mayors were in full swing, the liberals could get a good result in the parliamentary elections as well, maintaining an electoral advantage in the local elections. Unlike the PSD, the Liberals lost about a million local and parliamentary voters in the last rounds of elections.

For example, in the 2020 local elections, the PNL received 2.6 million votes for mayors, 2.5 million votes for local councils, and 2.2 million votes for district councils. Instead, in the parliamentary elections of the same year, PNL received 1.4 million votes in the Chamber of Deputies and 1.5 million votes in the Senate.

Moreover, the liberals are considering an electoral “counter” to remove unexpected candidates from the UDR or AUR. Thus, according to HotNews.ro sources, the liberals want to convince their coalition partners to vote for the best mayoral candidate, be it from PNL or PSD. The first discussions began even with the capital’s city hall, which led to the resignation of Cipriani Chucu from the position of the head of the PNL Bucharest organization. The option with the possibility of joint lists of candidates is also supported by PSD leaders consulted by libertatea.ro.

How the PNL is trying to sell the election merger to the public is a half-truth

However, election calculations are kept behind closed doors. Publicly, PNL leaders talk about the need to combine elections, citing stability in the context of the war in Ukraine, the high cost of four elections this year – European, local, parliamentary and presidential – and the desire of Romanians.

“This is a proposal that we discussed at today’s meeting, and we decided that at the level of specialists in the party, what are the elements of legality for such a measure, considering that according to the conducted polls, the majority wants to reduce the number of elections. From the experience of what has happened over the years, with the campaign and the election itself, we can see as simply as possible that the activity will be busy with the conduct of this very large number of elections. If there is a legal possibility to reduce the number of elections, we will find a solution,” said PNL chairman Nicolae Chuke, announcing the creation of a working group to unify the elections.

An internal PNL document states that two-thirds of Romanians would like some rounds of elections to be combined. By the way, this comes from a survey presented to the Liberals by Dan Motreanu, which, however, is kept secret for now.

An important part of the PNL’s message is that holding elections on different dates will result in huge costs for the budget.

Thus, according to PNL’s analysis, the 2019 European Parliament elections, the 2019 presidential elections, the 2020 local elections and the 2020 parliamentary elections cost a total of €516 million.

“So, organized separately, these four elections would have absorbed more than half a billion euros of public money. If some of them were organized together, the costs would be optimized and it would be possible to save about half of this amount: about 260 million euros,” says an internal PNL document, which states that “out of the 260 million euros, 52 km of highway could be built on a plain, 33-37 km of hilly terrain or 9-10 km of mountain highway” and “could cover half the cost of a regional hospital”.

Indeed, the cost of the election rounds referred to by the PNL was so high. However, the Liberals are silent on the fact that in 2020, three times more money was allocated to local and parliamentary elections than in 2016, thanks to health measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thus, the 2020 local elections cost 966,263,000 lei compared to 350,663,000 lei in 2016. 640,355,000 lei were allocated to women parliamentarians in 2020, compared to 224,488,000 lei in 2016. The difference is almost a billion lei, that is, about 205 million euros. Considering the fact that the first round of presidential elections can take place simultaneously with the parliamentary ones, the savings can be about the amount that liberals are now citing as an argument for unification.

The KKR decision states that local and parliamentary elections cannot be combined

Nikolay Chuke is not the first prime minister who wants to combine local and parliamentary elections. Emil Bock also tried it in 2012, but then the Constitutional Court said it was impossible.

The judges of the KKR recognized the approach to combining the two types of elections as unconstitutional. The judges noted that the extension of the mayors’ powers until the deputies’ own powers are exhausted (a difference of about 3 months) contradicts the Constitution.

They also argued that a large number of ballots, 6 to be exact, could cause difficulties in exercising the right to vote, which could ultimately lead to a restriction of that right.

Regarding the motivation for reducing costs, the Constitutional Court noted that “they cannot be considered as arguments that support, under any conditions, restrictions on the exercise of certain rights or freedoms or support measures that may affect the fundamental principles of the state” correctly.

The KKR also established that the combination of local and parliamentary elections leads to a violation of the right to be elected, since a person cannot simultaneously run for the position of mayor and for a deputy or senatorial mandate, as well as for the position of president. district council and on the mandate of a deputy or senator. (full text of the decision of the Constitutional Court HERE)