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Romania will have 35 representatives in the European Parliament and voters said they hope the parliamentarians will help improve living standards and the extent to which Romanians can move freely around Europe.
They were to replace members who were nominated by Romania’s parliament for the first months of EU membership.
The elections were originally scheduled for May this year, but had to be postponed due to what analysts described as "political infighting", between the country’s president, Traian Basescu, and Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu. A month before the scheduled vote, Basescu beat off an attempt to impeach him when he won a landslide victory in a referendum.
Opinion polls indicated the president’s centrist Democrats would win with the Liberals of Prime Minister Tariceanu trailing in surveys. Analysts said disillusionment in the government has grown since the European Union threatened to cut aid to Romania because of its agricultural and anti-corruption policies.
TOKES’ CHALLENGE
Among the dozen parties running, Reformed Bishop Laszlo Tokes, decided to run as an independent candidate, to represent Romania’s 1.5 million ethnic Hungarians.
Most of them live in the area of Transylvania, which belonged to Hungary before the 1920 Treaty of Trianon gave the region to Romania.
Bishop Tokes’ participation in the ballot has been big news on Hungarian television, in part because he also played a key role in the 1989 revolution that overthrew dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
He was persecuted for his faith and pro-democracy activities. Attempts by authorities to expel him and his family from their home in the town Timisoara motivated an angry crowd to protect Tokes.
That eventually led to clashes with the army but the uprising soon spread to other cities and, eventually, Bucharest. Nearly 100 people are known to have died during and shortly after the overthrow of Ceausescu who was executed, with his wife Elena, on Christmas Day, 1989.
CONTROVERSIAL DECISION
Tokes has defended his controversial decision to run as an independent against the main ethnic-Hungarian political party, the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania.
“The elections are giving people the freedom to choose the political party they like, he tells the Budapest-based conservative television network Hir TV,” he said. “It is no surprise that Hungarians in Romania vote primarily for ethnic-Hungarian politicians. All ethnic Hungarians are living with their national feeling and a strong longing to their homeland,” he added.
Among his announced plans, the bishop wants to promote more autonomy for ethnic Hungarians and improve their educational opportunities. The European parliament election coincided with a referendum on reforms for national elections in Romania, intended to make politicians more accountable to voters and to curb top-level fraud.
Romania joined the European Union January 1. (This BosNewsLife News story also airs on the Voice of America (VOA) network. Bos report – Download MP3 (708k) Listen to Bos report or go to www.voanews,com )
