By-election in Romania
On Sunday Romania’s capital city, Bucharest, elected its mayor in a ballot, which registered the lowest turnout in Romania’s post-communist history
Daniela Budu, 08.12.2025, 14:00
Citizens of Bucharest went to the polls on Sunday to cast their ballot for the 12th mayor of Bucharest after the 1989 anti-communist Revolution. The 11 mandates until now were held by eight mayors, as three of them served in two mandates. Two of the mayors would later become presidents of Romania, namely Traian Basescu and Nicusor Dan. This time the Liberal Ciprian Ciucu won the election held on Sunday for the Bucharest mayor seat with a little over 36% of the votes.
A close ally of Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, and the mayor of the capital’s district 6, he won the election in five out of the six districts of Bucharest. Ciucu will serve a shorter mandate than his predecessors, less than three years until the next mandate in 2028.
After the returns were published, Ciprian Ciucu said:
Ciprian Ciucu: ”We are going to have a lot of work together at the Bucharest City Hall and we are going to have many projects to implement. I want to make Bucharest the project of my life, not on a short term but on a long one.”
Anca Alexandrescu came second in Sunday’s election with roughly 22% of the votes; she was backed by the populist, ultranationalist opposition AUR. The Democrat Daniel Băluță came third in the race with nearly 21%. Fourth was Cătălin Drulă of the USR with 14 percent followed by Ana Ciceală of SENS with 6%. Turnout in the aforementioned election failed to reach 33%. Bucharest hasn’t seen such a low turnout since 2008, which had two election rounds. The final returns showed that Bucharest voted for a liberal mayor offering Prime Minister Bolojan ‘the upper hand in a fragile pro-European ruling coalition, and handing a defeat to a hard-right contender tipped to win’, Reuters say.
According to the aforementioned agency, ‘the influential post has been vacant since May when centrist independent Nicusor Dan won a presidential election re-run one year into his second term as mayor, and polls had shown Bucharest on the verge of becoming the first European Union capital led by a hard-right politician’.
Reuters also recalls that Sunday’s election took place one year after Romania cancelled a presidential election on suspicion of Russian interference that favoured a far-right frontrunner.
Local by-election rounds for mayor seats also took place on Sunday in 12 other localities in Romania, while in Buzau county, the country’s south-east, Social-Democratic MP and former president of the Social-Democrats, Marcel Ciolacu, won the county council with more than half of the votes. Worth mentioning is that since June 2024, in one year and a half Bucharesters cast their ballots in eight types of elections, presidential, local, for the EU Parliament, a local referendum and for their own Parliament.
(bill)
