The chances for early legislative elections are higher than last year because more members of the Parliament favor the close of this period and the opening of a new, more stable one. However, in the PSD, there is no uniform view on early legislative elections, according to Attila Korodi, RMDSZ caucus leader. At stake are many delicate issues…
In an interview with Romanian news portal Ziare, Korodi corroborated the RMDSZ position on the matter, as mentioned by the president of the party, Hunor Kelemen. “We analyzed the matter in December, and we’ve seen how the relationship between the government and Parliament, and the parties and the Parliament, works. We believe that it is appropriate to open a new period with a more stable political system,” Korodi said.
While the governing Liberal Party’s position is clear – and the RMDSZ is a partner on this matter – the Social Democrats still represent a threat because their strategy is to submit a motion of no-confidence in the Liberal government led by Ludovic Orban in the next parliamentary session, which starts in February. The announcement was made just a few days ago by the interim PSD president, Marcel Ciolacru. Korodi, however, doesn’t consider this a threat because, according to him, “there is no monolithic view within the party against the early legislative elections.”
The discussion also brought up other delicate matters, such as the two-round election system, which would damage the RMDSZ, but Korodi refuted earlier rumors suggesting that the government would modify the election system in an election year. “Forming a majority in the government included a written agreement, in which he [ed. note: PM Orban] took responsibility for not raising the matter to the level of emergency decree. When you sign an agreement on a specific topic, I believe, no politician would want to break his promise.”
Since the 2020 calendar year has already begun, the country needs a budget as well, and the government has now assumed responsibility for this year’s budget. But the Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) has been subsequently requested to solve the judicial conflicts of a constitutional nature between the government and Parliament regarding the 2020 State Budget Law. If the conflict is not resolved by the end of January, we have a problem, Korodi said. By assuming control of the state budget, the government has opened a Pandora’s Box because anyone, even a stable government, can use this method to its own advantage, excluding input from other decision-makers. The RMDSZ position on the matter is that a state budget has to be decided upon after input from all decision-makers in the political arena.
An additional topic on the table is autonomy for Szeklerland – a topic Korodi believes needs to be discussed. And the best place to talk about it is in Parliament. An initiative submitted by two of Korodi’s colleagues, Zsolt-István Bíró and József-György Kulcsár-Terza, serves to keep this topic on the Parliament’s agenda. Korodi says the party has a set of well-defined instruments, along the lines of the current mechanism being utilized in South Tyrol, the autonomous province in northern Italy.
He maintains that the constitution of Romania must contain administrative units called regions, which would allow regions like Szeklerland to function autonomously. At present, the Romanian legal framework assigns members of the Hungarian speaking community in Transylvania individual linguistic and cultural rights only. Korodi believes that historical territories where Transylvanian Hungarians statistically form a dominant majority (in this case, Szeklerland) should be granted territorial autonomy, and South Tyrol serves as a good example of how such territorial autonomy works within a country.
