Romania’s ruling coalition agrees to hold presidential elections on May 4

MADRID Jan. 8 () –

Romania’s ruling coalition has agreed to hold the first round of the presidential elections on May 4 after the Constitutional Court annulled the electoral results of the last elections due to signs of Russian interference.

The Social Democratic Party (PSD), the conservative Union to Save Romania (USR), the liberals of the PNL and the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) have agreed that a second round will take place two weeks later: on May 18 .

The coalition has also decided that during the first round, partial elections will be held in 13 municipalities, the Busteni City Council and the Bihor provincial council, according to the Agerpres news agency.

As they already agreed in mid-December, they will run in the elections with a single candidate, Crin Antonescu, former leader of the PNL and former minister in the late 1990s, as well as former interim president for a month in mid-2012.

The objective is to stop the advance of the eurosceptic far-right represented by the candidate Calin Georgescu, whose sovereigntist speech far from the path outlined by the European Union and NATO obtained more than 23 percent of the votes in the first round of the presidential elections in the country. .

The Constitutional Court annulled the first results of the elections after signs of Russian interference. Romania’s Intelligence services claimed that almost 800 Tiktok accounts created by a “foreign state” in 2016 were suddenly activated during the campaign to support Georgescu, while another 25,000 were created two weeks before the elections.

The president of Romania, Klaus Iohannis, accepted at the end of December the proposal of the social democratic prime minister Marcel Ciolacu to continue in office after the PSD was the party with the most votes in the parliamentary elections of December 1 with a five-point lead. on the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR).

The conservatives of Union Save Romania (USR) do not support the current Ciolacu Executive. If Romania’s highest court had not annulled the results of the presidential election, its leader, Elena Lasconi, would have faced Georgescu in the second round.