Wahlen in Rumänien: Ein ukrainisches Szenario?

Die Wahlen in Rumänien vom 28. November mögen als Schritt auf
dem Weg des Landes nach Europa beschrieben worden sein, aber der
Vorwurf des Wahlbetrugs lässt das Land eher wie sein Nachbarland
Ukraine erscheinen. Diese Meinung vertritt Razvan
Amariei in einem von Transitions
Online veröffentlichten Artikel.

In the days after the ballot, the two main opposition forces
accused the ruling coalition of the ex-Communist Social Democratic
Party (PSD) and its ally, the Humanistic Party (PUR), of fraud. The
coalition had defeated the opposition Justice and Truth Alliance
(DA) in elections for parliament as well as a first round of the
presidential poll. (A runoff is scheduled for 12
December.) 

Fraud of sloth?

Allegations of fraud were first raised by the vice president of
the nationalist Greater Romania Party (PRM). A few minutes after
the polls closed, with exit poll results coming in, Lucian Bolcas
said he strongly suspected the election had been rigged.

But two days later, similar accusations were leveled by Traian
Basescu, the DA presidential candidate, mayor of Bucharest, and
leader of the Democratic Party, a main component of the
Alliance.

“We ask for the elections to be canceled and repeated,” Basescu
said. “We have proof that the results were forged by transferring
160,000 annulled votes to the account of [PSD-PUR candidate Adrian]
Nastase.”

“After stealing factories, houses, and money, the PSD now wants
to steal the Romanian people, too,” he added.

The authorities reacted to these claims with unconvincing
assurances that the counting had been correct and that whatever
errors there may have been were simply the result of human and
computer error. 

Another stock reply came from one of the PSD leaders: “Basescu
is a sore loser.”

But Basescu amplified his accusations: additional hundreds of
thousands of annulled votes for the Senate and the Chamber of
Deputies had been directed to the PSD-PUR, he said. And Alliance
representatives in some county electoral offices had been tricked
into going home during the night so the fraud could proceed.

But Basescu also said, “Romania is not Ukraine. We don’t need
people to go out in the streets, because we’ve had our revolution
in 1989.”

The accusations were substantiated to some extent by reports
from around the country.

There were persistent rumors that the PSD-PUR bused in
supporters to vote more than once. Reporters filmed buses full of
government employees leaving Bucharest on rather unusual field
trips to the countryside; they also demonstrated how simple it was
to peel off the voting stamp from laminated identity cards and to
go to a different polling station to vote again.

More than 700,000 people voted in a polling station other than
the one at which they were registered. This is legal and not
necessarily fraudulent, but it fed suspicions of foul play.

Finally, thousands of blank ballots disappeared from several
voting stations, and hundreds of official reports on the vote
turned out to be inaccurate. 

The Alliance was joined in its outrage by some smaller parties
and prominent independent bodies such as the Pro Democratia
Association (APD). APD chairman Cristian Parvulescu had raised the
possibility of fraud long before the polls opened; after the
ballot, he and representatives of 14 additional groups asked the
Central Electoral Office to suspend the electoral process in order
to allow an international investigation into its fairness.

The APD also threatened to withdraw its observers from the
presidential runoff due to the bad treatment they received on 28
November.

But the electoral office rejected all appeals from political
parties and independent organizations, while Western officials
seemed unwilling to manage yet another election crisis in the
region.

While any fraud would probably have been too insignificant to
swing the result, given the five-point lead of the PSD-PUR, it is
an acute embarrassment for European governments. Romania is poised
to join the EU in 2007, but serious snags could still delay
entry. 

The EU had no official reaction to the election in Romania.

Senior OSCE envoy Stephen Nash said, “While the democratic
process appears to be further consolidated in Romania, some
procedural concerns have been raised regarding suspension of the
use of voter cards. In the context of a closely contested election,
this has the potential to affect public confidence.” Nash headed an
18-strong observer mission. 

“We recognize the valid concerns expressed by many organizations
about numerous irregularities during the vote,“ the U.S. embassy in
Bucharest said in a statement. “Rather than stepping away from the
second round of the presidential vote, however, we urge independent
groups again to provide a robust civil society monitoring presence
on December 12.”

Romanian observers were less sanguine. Cristian Tudor Popescu,
editor in chief of the influential daily Adevarul,
thinks that Basescu did Romania enormous harm with his accusations.
But the electoral office also neglected its duties, Popescu says:
instead of investigating Basescu’s claims, it went on a political
offensive against the Alliance. 

To read the article in full, visit the Transitions Online website.