Romania’s new presidential election will take place on May 4, with a runoff planned two weeks later May 18.
The leaders of the three parties in the country’s governing coalition — the Social Democrats, the National Liberals and the Hungarian minority party — and a representative of ethnic minorities represented in the parliament decided the date in a meeting Wednesday in Bucharest.
The government will publish an official order to make the election dates official next week, since Romanian law requires that to happen at least 75 days before the first election day.
The leaders of Romania’s governing coalition parties also reaffirmed their support Wednesday for former National Liberal Party leader Crin Antonescu as their common candidate for president. The parties first announced Antonescu’s candidacy last month.
The announcements come just over a month after Romania’s Constitutional Court canceled the initial election just a few days before a runoff was to take place between independent ultranationalist candidate Călin Georgescu and Elena Lasconi, a reformist candidate from the center-right Save Romania Union party.
The top court made the unprecedented decision and ordered a do-over due to suspicions that Georgescu was propelled by Russia into first place in the first round of the presidential election on Nov. 24, when he and Lasconi edged out Social Democrat Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu.
Declassified intelligence documents alleged that paid influencers, along with members of extremist, right-wing groups and people with ties to organized crime, promoted Georgescu’s candidacy online and especially on TikTok ahead of Nov. 24.
The documents didn’t directly state that Russia was behind those influencers — but they strongly suggested it. No more evidence has come out since the election cancellation to substantiate the allegations.
A majority of Romanians think it was a bad decision to cancel the election, according to a small poll of nearly 1,000 respondents by the Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy, a think tank. Georgescu would have won the runoff if it wasn’t canceled, according to the poll.
The post Romania’s government announces new presidential election dates appeared first on Politico.
