The latest poll by Metro Media Transilvania explicitly reflects the impressions on voters’ minds. After ten years when the entire political class has been to power and failed to make a point, Romanians would rather have a single-coloured government. But the first-round vote shows that the future government will require a coalition to work.
What kind of coalition? No one knows. Not even the parties in the election race. For now, they seem to be looking for alliances that will maintain/propel them in power. Everyone seems to have deserted the idea of sticking to doctrines and beliefs. When they evaluate the vote results on June 4, all parties claim they had won, but their arguments differ from one another. PDSR says it won because it collected the best score among the parties. The Christian Democrats won because, together with the Liberals (the top two parties in the present CDR), plus UDMR, plus other smaller parties that are compatible with CDR, raised a score comparable to PDSR’s. The Liberals, because they scored unexpectedly much, although they ran on separate lists. PD, because it collected more than the polls were saying. The fact is, in the general elections, any coalition formula will include, besides a main party, two if not three parties that will each hold in their hands the fate of government. While the PDSR government has worked with a few satellite parties that worked as a majority voting machine, the CDR government needed only one referee party, PD, to fail. How will a coalition with two or three referees work? We’ll see.
Unfortunately, the voter’s confusion is not always limited to the question “who should I vote for?” It goes deeper into the system. For instance, to the question “what elections do you think are most important?”, 25% point to the presidential vote, and other 25% to local elections. Parliament elections are deemed important only by 10% of the polled, although the composition of government depends on the vote on Parliament, which effectively manages the country’s affairs. The percentage is disturbingly low and reflects the voters’ distrust in the legislative power, sanctioning for the umpteenth time Parliament’s performance. Which proves once again that an institution can be established by any law – even the Constitution – and vested with greater powers, but still serve no good if its only achievement is that it occasionally gathers the quorum.
Even less (3%) believe local elections are the most important, although the local council will make decisions that will affect the voter’s everyday life and impact the locality where he lives.
Confusion over state institutions and their role is complete in the FNI case. To the question “who do you think is primarily responsible for the scandal?”, 18% pointed to the management, 10% to the Government, and the rest was split among a broad spectrum of institutions, parties and people: the political power (4%), deponents (3%), the Finance Ministry, banks/NBR, CEC, CDR, CNVM, Constantinescu/presidency (2% each), PN?CD, PDSR, Iliescu, justice (1% each). These dispersed opinions show not only that very few people know who does what and what they should be doing in this country, but that the state institutions themselves don’t know or don’t want to do what the law tells them to do.