Does Looking for Political Success Mean Undermining the Parliament? 
Populism and Institutional Weakness in Romania

Dragos DRAGOMAN

Department of Political Science “Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu 
Centre Régional Francophone de Recherches Avancées en Sciences Sociales

Abstract: Following the successful membership to NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007, Romania witnessed a serious democratic setback. As in other countries in the region, the backsliding is due to the lifting of the external conditionality and monitoring. This is the moment when political elites in power got rid of previous constraints and refused to respect the minimum consensus set up previously in order to reach the external membership targets, namely to obey to the rule of law, respect the constitutional stability and work for the good governance. The new context, labeled by some scholars as post-accession hooliganism, is thus marked by the extended use of the executive power, the revival of political arbitrary, partisanship, pervasive corruption and abuse. In Romania, post-accession hooliganism developed under the populist banner of state reinvigoration, modernization and constitutional reform, with brutal attacks against politically neutral institutions and all intermediate liberal democratic institutions that mediate representation, and more specially against parliament. This is a recent feature in Romanian politics that raises much concern about the full consolidation of democracy in the context of persistent economic crisis. With the democratic institutions severely weakened, the ground might be prepared for much more radical political action, which can be seen as a serious threat for an unconsolidated democracy.

Keywords: populism, liberalism, democracy, consensualism, Romania

1. 1. INTRODUCTION

Populism has become recently one of the key common issues in both Western and Eastern Europe. In both settings, populists claim for direct democracy, appeal to the ‘pure people’ and support charismatic leaders who channel social discontent against the ‘corrupt elite’, conceived as rigged against ordinary people in an attempt to deprive the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice.1 They fuel the irrationalism and anti-intellectualism of the economically frustrated middle-class and support the resurgence of social conservatism and authoritarianism.2 The difference between West and East is the capacity of containing such radical populist movements in the framework of the liberal democratic system. Whereas Western democracies put those parties perceived as populist on the fringe of the political system and managed to keep them out of executive power,3 in Central and Eastern Europe populist parties put in place favorable mechanisms for consolidating in power, silence critics, destructurate democratic institutions and undermine opposition parties. They put a brutal hold to the initial minimal consensus that helped countries in the region to join NATO and the European Union, namely to obey to the rule of law, respect the constitutional stability and work for the good governance in the framework of the economic liberalization.4

From the perspective of the death of the elite consensus, victorious populism in Central and Eastern Europe marks the end of the external constraint, which is the European integration.5 In fact, EU clearly worked as a powerful constraint tool for political parties and leaders or, more symbolic, as an anesthetic.6 The removal of the external constraint and the death of the liberal consensus brought in brutal political hooliganism,7 which refuses to obey anymore the separation of powers and to acknowledge the existence of politically neutral institutions, as courts of justice and especially constitutional courts, central banks, supervising and ruling institutions for mass-media. Post-accession hooligans despise all intermediate liberal democratic institutions that mediate representation.8 They don’t hesitate to limit media freedom, to alter the professionalism of civil servants and to replace them with obedient and helpful, yet unqualified, new public servants. The common feature in the region is the unrestrictedly use the executive power in the logic of the revival of political arbitrary, partisanship and abuse.9

The attacks against intermediate liberal democratic institutions that mediate representation are the most prominent feature of populism in Romania. Yet populists largely dissimulated their struggle to control the whole political system under the banner of the much awaited state reinvigoration, modernization and constitutional reform. Traian Băsescu, the president of Romania between 2004 and 2014 and his populist Democrat-Liberal Party (PDL) in government (2004-2007 and 2008-2012) both won the 2004 elections by promising a bitter fight against endemic corruption and state institutions’ inefficiency. Instead, they rapidly turned against liberal democratic institutions and fiercely attacked parliament as the ultimate expression of unpopular elite domination, despised judges and the courts of justice for their allegedly undue privileges and immovability, denied the rule of law and largely criticized hostile mass-media for allegedly continuous hidden arrangements with corrupt politicians and business-men. The parliament remained however the ultimate obstacle in their effort of embodying the sovereignty of the true people and that is why parliament was subject to such brutal attacks.

The article intends to thoroughly analyze the mechanisms used by populists for undermining parliament in the logic of the uncontested dominance of the executive power and political abuse. It argues that the abuse against parliament is one of the most serious attacks against the fragile democracy in Romania and a serious concern for national security. Despite the fact that reasonable critique against parliament is very common in Romania, populist attacks and measures against representative institutions are an essential threat for democracy. From this perspective, populism in Romania is more reasonably comparable with inter-war radical populism that undermined unconsolidated democracies in Italy and Germany, and much less to contemporary populism in Western Europe.

1. 2. FROM LEGITIMATE POLITICAL CHANGE TO POPULIST CONSOLIDATION IN POWER

Populism is not a recent feature in Romanian politics. Since the early 1990s, when the first changes within the political system took place, populists tried to combine the Romanian nationalism used by the communist regime in its latter period10 with the popular fears raised by sharp social change and economic uncertainty. The combination gave birth to a populist party that was an actor of the political space for almost two decades, namely Greater Romania Party.11 Its slow but constant decline12 opened the door to other populist parties, including Partidul Poporului Dan Diaconescu (PPDD) and the Democrat-Liberal Party itself. The difference between PDL and other populist parties is its access to power, its willingness to shape policies according to its populist discourse. This is why PDL is taken here as a case study for post-accession hooliganism and for ruling populism. In order to give a full perspective on the political trajectory of successful and declining populism, a separate investigation will focus on PDL’s strategy of maintaining in power as much as possible and its ability of conserving electoral support even in times of political defeat, as it was the case in 2012. For the moment, we focus on PDL’s rule in power and on its attacks against parliament.

Once in office in 2004, the president Traian Băsescu and the Democrat-Liberal Party seemed trying answering to legitimate claims for political system reinvigoration, fairness, transparency and accountability. Using a personal political style labeled as ‘triage democracy’,13 in fact a strategy of triggering and solving successive political crises in order to master the public agenda, the president put in line truth and justice slogans, promising the access to the former communist political police files and to morally clean the Romanian society,14 with proposals for the substantial revisions of the electoral law, changing the legislative-executive balance of power and the size and structure of the legislature. In line with the limited verbal condemnation of communism,15 those initial proposals looked more like proposals for increasing institutional efficiency. On a closer examination in the context of populism consolidating in power, it soon became visible that the actions taken by populists were directed against the parliament.

For almost two decades, the MPs in Romania were elected by using a proportional representation (PR) formula. Despite the benefits of proportionality for minority parties during the initial phase of democratization,16 PR came under severe criticism for its mechanism of candidate selection. The decision of parties in selecting candidates was designated by many intellectuals and politicians as a significant obstacle in reinvigorating political parties’ offer. Focusing on candidate selection mechanisms, which were not always free of corruption and served many times to appoint inefficient politicians, many NGOs and the public opinion largely entrusted electoral reform and the passage from PR to a single-member district majoritarian system as a clear mean of enhancing transparency and responsibility, fostering electoral competition, and compelling improvements in the quality of representative government.17

The opportunity was largely used by populists to fight against parliament as the ultimate expression of the corrupt elite, retrenched in parliament and willing to ignore people’s desire for transparency and efficiency. Under pressure, the Liberal Party (PNL) in government at the time, issued a legislative proposal based on the German mixed-member model that carefully balances legitimacy through district-based elected MPs with overall proportional fair political representation, and his proposal was adopted by the parliament. In conflict with the liberal prime-minister, the president Băsescu contested the voted law before the Constitutional court and succeeded to invalidate it in November 2007. His preference, in accordance with PDL, was the first-past-the-post system (FPTP), and his only second option was a French type majoritarian two-round runoff system (TR). Using his constitutional right to appoint national referendums, he decided to accompany the election of Romania’s European deputies in November 2007 by a popular referendum on the topic of the uninominal voting system. Only the low turnout disabled president’s proposal to be validated, despite four-fifths of the electors voting ‘yes’.

The conflict between the president, who was speaking for the people, and the parliamentary majority lead by PNL ended in a compromise, a complicated single-member district uninominal voting system, which turned the electoral system from a very difficult to understand and complicated to operate system to a more convoluted and obscure one, a step forward in order to achieve district-based representation, but with no effects on the selection of candidates and on the ‘purifying’ of the political class.18 Moreover, PDL used the new electoral provisions in 2008 not to support the district-based representation, but to win as many parliamentary seats and consolidate in executive power. Instead of candidate-centered campaign, PDL members used a nation-wide, unified, giant electoral campaign supported by the president’s popularity. They did not increase the legitimacy of the elected representatives by appointing candidates that lived and worked in local districts or county constituencies or who felt eager to establish connections with the local contexts and electors. In 2012, many top PDL leaders who were MPs incumbent candidates leaved their initial constituencies and moved into PDL’s strongholds, looking for a safe vote.19 Back in 2008, following the successful elections, they did not help consolidate the much awaited new linkage between electors and MPs, as they encouraged MPs from other parties in parliament to despise their responsibility towards districts of origin, to break with their initial party ranks and join PDL in order to secure a ‘fabricated’ majority. All in all, they did little in helping the parliament and the MPs to gain in public prestige and support and worked against the consolidation of the representative institutions, since only populists were entitled to speak for the people.20

For the years to come following the 2007 referendum on the topic of the uninominal voting system, populists used the referendum’s outcome in order to pinpoint parliament as an obsolete and vicious institution, refusing to put in place people’s will. Since the referendum was not compulsory, even the PDL majority in parliament was not eager to adopt a roughly majoritarian electoral system, keeping in mind that such a system could become a future supplementary obstacle, added to the fading popular support. In fact, populists’ preference for the FPTP system was purely instrumental. Following the parliament’s no confidence vote and the dismissal of the PDL government in 2012, the new majority in parliament formed by PNL and the Social-Democrat Party (PSD) passed a new electoral law for the next parliamentary elections, essentially based on pure majoritarianism, namely on the FPTP system. Facing a severe electoral defeat, PDL contested the law to the Constitutional court and the court overruled the low, keeping in place the electoral provisions from 2008. It has been proved afterwards that overruling the FPTP system was the only chance for PDL to keep its parliamentary representation, following its disastrous electoral defeat in the 2012 elections.

After the successful electoral campaign in 2008 by using the new electoral provisions, populists overtly turned against parliament. The president used once again of his constitutional right to appoint referendums and called the people to get rid of the sclerotic political class embodied by the parliament. The wording of the referendum was president’s proposal of reducing the number of MPs from 471 to no more than 300, and passing from a bicameral to a mono-cameral representative body. Symbolically, the referendum was set to accompany president’s own re-election for a second term, in November 2009. A slim majority of the electors (50.16 %) voted in favor of the referendum. Since in Romania only the constitutional referendums are compulsory and the 2009 referendum was consultative and not legally binding, the parliament was finally called to decide upon the change. His refusal was once again the perfect argument used by populists against the allegedly obsolete, corrupt and abusive institution of the parliament.

1. 3. WEAKENING THE LEGISLATURE: REDUCING BOTH MPS’ NUMBER AND CREDIBILITY

How could one explain populists’ success in stirring people, at least a slim majority, against parliament? The explanation could be twofold. On the one hand, populists pitted their popularity, and especially that of the president Băsescu, against the low esteem for parliament.21 As in other countries in the region during transition, parliament benefited of the lower citizens’ trust rate among institutions.22 During transition, the Romanian parliament was largely perceived as a collective body that merely responds to citizens’ needs, but was very effective in defending the legal impunity of the MPs who were under prosecutors’ investigation. This already bad image only helped populists to depict parliament as futile and ineffective, as the ultimate expression of irresponsiveness and abuse. In fact, trust in parliament is dependent on the way citizens conceive the accountability and the reliability of the political system, meaning that trust in parliament is higher in countries with low levels of corruption, proportional representation and long time, consolidated functional democracy, and lower in former communist countries.23

On the other hand, the populists balanced the alleged parliament’s ineffectiveness with the executive power prestige and claimed efficacy. The symbolic conflict turned into effective confrontation in 2007, when the parliament impeached and suspended president Băsescu, only to see him back in office following a substantial vote in the required national referendum for impeachment.24 The restoration of the president in office only boosted populists’ claims to weaken the parliament. They proposed that a failed attempt of impeachment should automatically trigger the dissolution of parliament. In president’s words, “if the referendum confirms the president, then the Parliament is dissolved”.25 In fact, the missing prerogative of dissolving the parliament was especially set up by the Constitution in 1991, which makes an effort to create a president powerful enough, but not too powerful to change the parliamentary features of the Romanian political system, despite the popular election of the president. In theory, the president should work as ‘mediator’ between state institutions, which really makes him a president from a typical parliamentary system. The menaces of the president to dissolve the parliament, similar to those he made during the presidential campaign in 2009, are out of the scope of the presidential power set up by the Romanian constitution.

The second impeachment of the president Băsescu in June 2012 marks the climax of the populist attacks against parliament. When asked by the parliament about the constitutional opportunity of the second impeachment, the Constitutional court clearly acknowledged and stated president’s lack of neutrality and sanctioned his decision to abandon his mediator status. In fact, Traian Băsescu abandoned since 2005 his mediator status and acted much more like a de facto party leader, negotiating with parties for securing a safe majority into parliament for PDL, openly attacking opposition parties and hostile mass-media and overtly supporting his favorite candidate for the presidency of PDL, his former party. His practice of frequently heading PDL meetings was even acknowledged as ‘customary’ by PDL leaders.26 Moreover, the menaces to dissolve the parliament in November 2009 were also made in order to put pressure on the parliamentary parties, if his favorite candidate for prime-minister would not have been supported by the parliament.27 Finally, the PDL president Emil Boc was appointed prime-minister in December 2009. Between 2009 and 2012, populists have secured the overwhelming power, by cumulating the parliamentary majority, the two executive branches of the executive power, namely the government and the president, and by appointing new judges to the Constitutional court. Additionally, the PDL government replaced hundreds of civil servants with obedient and helpful new public servants in central and local administration, while the PDL majority in parliament replaced the directors of the public television and of the National Audio-Visual Council. Only the sharp erosion of their popularity, due to severe cuts in social benefits during the severe economic crisis and the unprecedented corruption scandals affecting high government officials,28 including Sorin Blejnar, the head of the Fiscal National Agency, as well as tourism, economy, communication, education and sport ministers in the PDL government,29 made the prime-minister Emil Boc to be the first prime-minister dismissed by the parliament since 1989.30

The impeachment from June 2012 has been labeled by populists as a coup. Soon after the favorable vote in parliament, when the president Băsescu was suspended and the people asked to decide upon dismissal on a national referendum, as they already did in 2007, foreign embassies and the European Commission have been alerted in relation to a coup perpetrated in Romania, where the parliament has illegally suspended the president and deprived him of his legitimate power. The alert has been received with much concern and dissatisfaction by the German chancellery and personally by the presidents of the European Commission and of the European Parliament, but also by numerous members of the European People’s Party.31 The confusion was such that foreign embassies and the European institutions did not consult the Romanian constitution, where the impeachment procedure is legally stated, and accepted to support populists in Romania in their claims regarding the alleged coup that violated democratic rules.

The impeachment procedure ended with a very controversial vote at the end of June 2012. Despite the huge share of electors voting ‘yes’,32 the referendum was invalidated by the Constitutional court for technical reasons. The issue at stake was the required threshold for validation. Noticing the damage potential of the impeachment referenda, following the 2007 failed impeachment, the PDL majority in parliament amended in May 2011 the referendum law and set up a legal threshold.33 In order to validate a referendum, the participation should be at least 50 % plus one vote from the overall electoral corpus. Defining the electoral corpus was, in fact, the key for the legal invalidation of the referendum. Although a population census was done in 2011, unraveling a severe loss of population and an important migration process, the PDL government did not make public its results. Therefore, the demographic benchmark used in 2012 was the available 2002 census, accompanied by unreliable and contradictory personal data issued by the Electoral Authority and the Interior Ministry. With significant differences between the figures put forward by various state authorities, the Constitutional court decided to invalidate the referendum. When the census data was finally available in 2013, it turned out that the legal threshold imposed by populists as a technical safeguard was in fact surpassed in June 2012.

But the vote was also controversial for another reason. A successful impeachment would have prematurely ended the president’s second term in office, a situation hard to conceive by the populists who still controlled the presidential power, but lost the parliamentary majority and their government was dismissed by the parliament in the spring 2012. The political struggle was focusing on the impeachment outcome, but the conflict was developing in a different political environment. Speaking for the people, in 2007 the president turned the failed impeachment in a boost for his fight against the corrupt and abusive political elite retrenched in parliament. In 2012, a successful impeachment would have confirmed the paradox of unpopular populists, adding the presidential impeachment to the dismissal of the PDL government. Therefore, a parallel strategy was to declare the voting to the referendum as undemocratic. The president himself made a televised statement and called for a democratic boycott as a mean for preserving the democracy. Moreover, the Chief Prosecutor Daniel Morar, head of the Anti-Corruption National Agency, stated in a televised address that 2 of the 8 million casted ballots were illegal, confirming that the boycott expressed by the president and his allies from PDL was justified.34 Despite the hundreds of citizens put under judicial investigation by the prosecutors the following days, few cases were send by the prosecutors in court and merely a couple of people have been found guilty of electoral misconduct. If there were some electoral frauds, the final judicial outcome is far from the alleged millions of illegally casted ballots.

1. 4. POPULISM AND THE DOMINANCE OF THE EXECUTIVE POWER

The ‘presidentialisation’ of the political system, attempted by the populists, might undermine not only the legislative-executive balance of power and the consolidation of parliamentarism,35 but even the quality of democracy.36 Whereas they did not succeed in changing the overall constitutional framework as they initially intended by strengthening the presidential executive power, populists used extensively the existing constitutional provisions in order to impose the dominance of the executive power. This is not to say that PDL was the only party in power to push the legal provisions, but to stress that populists used a combined strategy to weaken and subordinate the parliament.

The primary observation is that populists used an existing tendency towards stronger majoritarianism to consolidate in power, and only secondly set up clearly oriented strategies to undermine the parliament. The new Romanian constitution from 1991, following moths of ardent debates, intended to offer to the Romanian post-communist society a new democratic framework that engulfed the logic of negotiation and compromise in an extremely conflictual political environment.37 All in all, the early Romanian democratic political system reflects a rather consensual than majoritarian logic, when the system is analyzed according to the separation and the concentration of powers on the executive and federal dimensions.38 It is true, the Romanian parliamentary system makes an effort to create a president enough powerful, but not too powerful to change its parliamentary features, despite the popular election of the president. The attempts made by populists to consolidate in power were in line with the transformations of the whole political system they wanted, especially with a concentration of power specific to the majoritarian political systems. The prerogative of the president to dissolve the assembly, his right to dismiss the prime-minister, they all point towards an attempt to consolidate the executive power.

It works the same for their willingness to get rid of the proportional representation and look for electoral systems that more easily ‘manufacture’ parliamentary majorities and strengthen the government branch. But majoritarian electoral systems largely undermine political competition,39 which may be a serious concern for unconsolidated democracies. The two-round runoff system (TR) favored by PDL in case the FPTP was not accepted, proves to be a destabilizing factor that inhibits democratic development, works to fragment the party-system and encourages the use of non-electoral means of exercising power.40 On the one hand, political competition is based no more on the capacity of parties to select appropriate candidates as it partially was the case for PR, but on their capacity to use on their own profit the willingness of already popular personalities, often from the show-business area, to involve in a political competition and get elected. This new political competition mechanism could strongly affect the consolidation of still inchoate political parties. On the other hand, TR and even more obviously the FPTF would encourage electoral fraud, since the total amount of votes necessary to decide the winner is narrower that it ever was in TR and especially in PR. As underlined by Birch, the electoral manipulation and misconduct in single-member districts under plurality and majority rule in Eastern Europe is significantly correlated with the proportion of seats elected under such electoral systems. FPTP and TR are far more advanced in shaping incentives to engage in electoral misconduct and severe violations of electoral integrity.

The new electoral system is to consolidate the executive, as populists were dissatisfied with the stability of the governing coalitions. This complaint was much in contrast with the effective stability of the Romanian governments. Unlike some parliamentary democracies that are characterized by short-lived executives, high party-system polarization and severe parliamentary instability, as the French Fourth Republic, Romania witnessed a rather stable executive, since only one government failed to get a confidence vote in 25 years of parliamentary democracy. When one takes into account all duly-constituted governments in Romania, he finds that Romanian government enjoyed a mean of 489 days in office.41 Though this time-span is shorter than the overall mean of eleven Central Eastern European democracies between 1990 and 2008, it is significantly longer than it is in Poland or Latvia, and much longer than it was in the mentioned French Fourth Republic (9 months) or even in Finland (13 months) during 1945-1980 period.42 Moreover, the crisis percentage index calculated by Conrad and Goldner as the percentage of time spent without duly-mandated governments is only 2.5 for Romania, which represents half of the overall mean of 5.2 for all eleven countries taken into account.

When all the institutional attempts to consolidate the executive power by amending the constitution or by changing the electoral law failed, populists turned against parliament by adopting new strategies. The first strategy was to literally flood the parliament’s agenda with government emergency ordinances. Although emergency ordinances are acknowledged by the Constitution as legitimate means of the executive power for responding to urgent issues (catastrophes, natural disasters, large scale accidents), populists in government turned the exception into a rule and issued a great number of such decrees that seriously inflated the parliamentary activity. Despite the fact that the emergency ordinances are to be finally voted by the parliament, they are effective from the moment when they are issued by the government. In practice, their consequences can hardly be erased by subsequent contrary decisions of the parliament. Moreover, those emergency ordinances, once issued, turn into a priority on parliament’s agenda. As emphasized by the Freedom House report for 2010, the issuing of an inordinately high number of emergency ordinances was a severe government abuse of power. PDL government also abused of its right to issue such ordinances the previous year, when it issued no more that 86 emergency ordinances in the first 6 months of 2009, in cases when government’s emergency intervention was not needed.43 The matters concerned by those ordinances are rarely an emergency, as they generally pertain to public spending, acquisitions and commercial agreements unrelated to emergency situations as severe natural disasters or large scale catastrophes or accidents. Many of those ordinances, especially those aiming to regulate public acquisitions and commercial agreements, are now under judicial investigation. The prosecutors believe that they were merely related to electoral campaign strategies and not to emergency situations.44

The second strategy used by PDL government is to shortcut the parliamentary debates and decisions and to replace them with executive responsibility endorsements. The domination model, described by this strategy, points toward the limitation and suppression of the legitimate contestation in parliament and abroad, in the public space. In fact, the endorsement procedure enables the government to automatically turn any of its proposals into effective law if the opposition in parliament does not demand for a confidence vote or if such vote is rejected by the majority in parliament. On the contrary, a confidence vote that fails automatically leads to the rejection of the proposal and to the dismissal of the government. Although this is a constitutional procedure, as it is clearly stated by the current constitution, it should remain an exceptional procedure. It can be used by a government in order to test the strength of its governing coalition or to make effective his political point of view, but it cannot be used as a normal legislative procedure. Despite the strong majority in parliament, PDL government headed by Emil Boc used 13 times on a row this procedure in order to turn proposals into effective laws. Although this is not at all illegal, this propensity for automatic law enacting only adds to the features of post-accession hooliganism, which despises the real people and makes substantial efforts to avoid free and democratic debate in parliament. This is a very serious democratic issue, noticing that the PDL government turned his proposals into effective laws in very sensitive and key areas, such as education, health care, public administration, budgetary and fiscal actions.

With the strengthening of the executive power, PDL displayed a low esteem for parliament and even for his own MPs. The treatment against his MPs during the required confidence vote demanded by the opposition following a governmental endorsement procedure is much telling. In order to avoid unpleasant situations that sometimes occurred during the confidence vote, while a very limited number of MPs overtly voted against their government, beginning with 2010, PDL MPs were not allowed by their party leaders to stand up, express their views or even vote in parliament. They were forced to be sited and wait for the end of the plenary session, with only the opposition MPs to express their views and voting. Even it could be taken for a rigid party discipline measure, this is an undemocratic feature, limiting MPs freedom of speech and action and despising their representative mandates.

The third strategy used by the populists was to limit the sovereignty of the parliament by limiting the scope of his legislative capacity. Anticipating a future government failure in securing a parliamentary majority and the dismissal of the PDL government, the PDL majority passed in 2010 a law empowering the Constitutional court to judge on matters that previously exceeded the court’s competence. Back in 1991, the Constitutional court was set up by the Constitution to impartially put in place the judicial review of constitutionality in the framework of a centralized system of judicial review, as other countries in the region did in the context on the uncertainty associated with competitive elections after 1989.45 Although the Constitutional court was always asked to decide on parliament’s procedural issues and on any legal matter related to human and civil rights, the separation of powers and possible constitutional conflicts between institutions, the court was never able to decide on parliament’s decisions which regarded other issues than those mentioned above. In other words, the parliament was the one to decide on political issues, as he currently embodies the national sovereignty. According to the new law (Law 177/2010, section 27), the Constitutional court has to decide on any matter, any time the court is notified, including the constitutionality of parliament’s decisions.46 When the parliament tried indeed in 2012 to recover its full powers by the mean of a new law restricting courts’ prerogatives to the extent of power the court enjoyed before 2010, the Court simply overruled the law and kept its ability to decide on political matters. The move made by the PDL majority in 2010 proved successful in 2012, when the Constitutional court rejected the new electoral law based on the plurality electoral system (‘first-past-the-post’ system), giving PDL the unexpected opportunity to keep its parliamentary status and secure few seats for his prominent leaders. Otherwise, PDL would have been totally defeated in the 2012 general elections, when no PDL candidate won his seat by winning the absolute majority of votes in the electoral constituency, but benefited of the proportional provisions of the former electoral law from 2008 and secured his seat by the means of the overall redistribution of votes at national level.

1. 5. CONCLUSION

Populists in Romania made consistent efforts to undermine the parliament in order to consolidate in power between 2008 and 2012. As representative body, the parliament was competing for the privilege to speak for the people. In fact, populists claim to speak for the real people and to fight its enemies, which are most often imaginary rather than real. In this bitter fight against elites, depicted as corrupt, irresponsive and rigged against ordinary people, they recruit uniformed persons with no clear political preferences and who look for emotional rather than programmatic political satisfactions. Populists identify those elites in the same way they identify aliens and alien powers as scapegoats for their own political failures.47

Undermining the parliament was, for instance, in line with a more general development of the political system in Romania, which turned from a more consensual type of system in the early stage of transition towards a more majoritarian type. From this perspective, the institutional crises that occurred in Romania and the conflicts between the president Băsescu and prime ministers from the opposition parties which ended with the impeachment attempts in 2007 and 2012 can be seen as inherent to the ambiguous separation of powers induced by the malfunctioning of semi-presidential regimes, as it was the case in other countries in Eastern Europe.48On a closer scrutiny, populists started by promising a bitter fight against endemic corruption and state institutions’ inefficiency, under the banner of state reinvigoration, modernization and constitutional reform, but ended in an fight against competing sources of legitimation and against the opposition and its political resources.49 The parliament went under the verbal attack of populists, who built their whole campaign in 2007 for supporting the president Băsescu during the impeachment procedure by attacking the 322 deputies who voted for president’s suspension. Moreover, in 2012, they labeled the second impeachment as a real coup and alerted the EU institutions and EU countries’ embassies, warning for the alleged democratic setback. Although those verbal attacks could be taken for no more than current political issues, they prepared the ground for more serious institutional changes.

The proposals made by populists for state modernization and constitutional reform point towards a willingness to reduce parliament’s power and credibility. Populists claimed that state modernization is by all means related to reducing the number of MPs from 471 to no more than 300 and to passing from a bicameral to a mono-cameral representative body. Moreover, they asked for stronger presidential powers, making Traian Băsescu a president able to dissolve the parliament in case of a failed presidential impeachment. In practice, president Băsescu despised the willingness of the parliamentary majority (PNL-PSD) and refused in October 2009 to appoint the prime-minister candidate supported by opposition parties, then the major of Sibiu-city, Klaus Johannis.50 The president ignored the parliamentary majority and wished to have it his way by renaming the same prime-minister, the PDL leader Emil Boc, a close confident and political ally.

In practice, the populists in government spared no effort to undermine the parliament by the excessive and unbalanced use of executive power. The PDL cabinet headed by Emil Boc flooded the parliament’s agenda with emergency ordinances, forcing him to put deputies’ initiatives on hold. Moreover, the prime-minister Emil Boc largely abused of his constitutional right to adopt laws by engaging government’s responsibility in parliament and thus regulated essential political domains with no parliamentary and public debate. In line with other attempts to strengthen the executive power and with PDL cabinet’s decision in 2011 to postpone regular elections scheduled for 2012,51 they raised the fear of a decisive undemocratic backsliding. These attacks against Parliament are more than politics as usual. Institutional weakness, as noticeable in Hungary and Poland in 2015, may seriously damage democratization. The democratic setback in Romania, conceived as national security issue, is now to be limited. Renewed efforts have to be done for consolidating political parties and the parliamentary mechanisms in order to fully consolidate democracy. This is not an easy task, noticing that populists dissolve partisan loyalties and rational choices among various political programs without replacing them with something of their own and make promises and raise expectations that generally cannot be fulfilled.52 Without the current re-democratization effort and the fight against high-level corruption, irrationalism, anti-elitism elitism and xenophobia against aliens depicted as scapegoats for various political failures could only prepare the ground for more radical action.

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