Right wins big in Romania parliament election, particularly populist right | Eastern North Carolina Now

Romania's parliamentary election saw a huge move to the right, as parties of the rignt won over two thirds of the votes cast.  In particular, it was a huge win for the populist nationalist anti-immigration right which won 33.70% of the vote among three parties winning seats, up from 9.08% in the last election.  Part of this surge came at the expense of parties of the traditional right which overall fell from 46.35% to 31.39% among three parties winning seats.  The one party on the left that won seats, the Social Democrats, who head the outgoing coalition, dropped from 28.90% last election to 20.61% this election.

The rest of the vote went to 23 smaller national parties that failed to reach the threshold to win seats, and to a group of small ethnic parties which are allowed to win a seat if they reach a certain special threshold.  Small ethnic parties hold 18 seats in the current parliament.  Small parties of the right that failed to win seats won another somewhat over 3% of the vote, many of them breakaways from the traditional right PNL.

On the populist nationalist anti-immigration right, the main party on that spectrum, AUR (Alliance for the Union of Romanians) more than doubled its vote from the last parliamentary election, winning 18.67%.  Two recently formed and more strident parties of the populist nationalist anti-immigration right, S.O.S. Romania and the Party of Young People, both breakaways from AUR, received 8.02% and 7.01% respectively.

The main traditional party of the right, the PNL won 13.32%, with the center-right Save Romania Union receiving 12.20%, and a center-right party representing ethnic Hungarians came in at 5.87%.   This was a slight gain for the Hungarian party and a decline for the other two.

The only party of the left to win seats, the Social Democrats  won 20.61%, a decline from 28.90% in the previous election.

Overall, this is a big shift from establishment parties of both left and right to the populist right.