Cav's Place

Today I should have written something about a conclusion, even if only a temporary one, to our political crisis, seeing as our Constitutional Court was supposed to rule on the validity of the referendum. However, I must limit myself to just a simple update, because the Constitutional Court instead announced that it’ll delay its decision until September 12 due to supposedly receiving conflicting information regarding the total number of voters, requesting updated information regarding the voter lists by August 31. Crin Antonescu will remain interim president until then.

To summarize what happened, on Sunday we had a referendum to impeach our current president, Traian Basescu, after he was suspended by the Parliament, which is currently controlled by his opponents, USL. According to the official results, 87.52% of votes were in favor of impeachment, but the turnout was only 46.24% after Basescu and PDL asked their supporters not to vote. As a result, Basescu should normally return to office regardless of the results of the vote, because the law states that the referendum is only valid if the turnout exceeds 50% of the total number of voters present on the lists.
However, USL and their supporters now claim that the referendum should, in fact, be valid because last year’s census showed that Romania’s population has dropped significantly and therefore the lists are outdated and the required turnout has actually been achieved, and they have sent documentation supporting their claim to the Constitutional Court. Yet, even according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, there are no other lists and the only confirmed total number of voters is the one specified before the referendum. It may not accurately reflect the data from the most recent census, but the full results of that are only supposed to be made public in late 2013 or even early 2014, not to mention that the current leaders of USL have been quoted at the time as saying that the census was so poorly organized and there have been so many errors that it could never be used to even determine the number of Romanians left.

Meanwhile, while PDL is asking for the government to resign and for Basescu to be reinstated immediately, some leaders of USL are looking beyond the Constitutional Court’s decision and suggesting that a second referendum should be organized, which I always believed to be a probable scenario in case the turnout won’t be reached, as they’re not going to give up before they gain full control of the country and squash anybody who may stand in their way. At the same time, the Parliament did recently grant itself the right to determine the validity of the referendum and, while prime minister Victor Ponta has stated that he will abide by the Constitutional Court’s ruling, Crin Antonescu has repeatedly stated that the only acceptable outcome is Basescu’s impeachment or resignation, according to the vote of the majority.
Antonescu’s stance is mirrored by many others, be they politicians, activists or regular citizens, with the politicians and many regular citizens saying that Basescu should be impeached regardless of the turnout and the activists and the other regular citizens generally saying that, while the low turnout should rule out impeachment, the only acceptable outcome is his resignation, because the majority should decide. However, all of these seem to forget about the 2009 referendum, when the parties that currently make up USL were calling for a boycott but which was actually valid, having a 50.95% turnout. Then, 72.31% voted in favor of switching to a unicameral Parliament and 83.31%, which actually means over 360000 people more than those who voted in favor of impeachment on Sunday, voted in favor of limiting the number of members of the Parliament to a maximum of 300. However, nobody except PDL and Basescu, who has repeatedly offered his resignation in exchange for modifying the Constitution according to the results of that referendum and also reducing the president’s term back to four years, seems to have much of a problem with completely ignoring that majority…