The 2009 presidential election case

Legally speaking, the investigation into allegations that the 2009 presidential election in Romania may have been rigged, ended before actually starting.

Bogdan Matei, 28.06.2017, 13:06

The Prosecutor General’s Office has closed the case on the 2009 presidential election in Romania, as a result of which Traian Basescu won his second term in the presidential office, after defeating the Social Democrat Mircea Geoana. Prosecutors have stated that no illegal acts could be identified, such as abuse of power or electoral fraud. Prosecutors have heard several politicians who back then were holding key-positions in state institutions and have called on the Permanent Electoral Authority and the Special Telecommunications Service to provide them with relevant documents.

The case was opened following statements made by the journalist and former political adviser Dan Andronic, who claimed that on the eve of the second round of the 2009 presidential election, he ran, in informal circumstances, into a meeting of the Prosecutor General Laura Codruta Kovesi, currently the head of the National Anticorruption Directorate, the former director of the Romanian Intelligence Service, George Maior, currently ambassador to Washington, and his first deputy Florian Coldea. Andronic stated he felt like witnessing the meeting of a crisis team, especially given that all those mentioned before would most likely have been dismissed had Geoana won.

That, according to Andronic, would explain the tension upon learning the exit-poll results and the relief the next day, when Basescu was announced winner, although the difference between him and his contender was of only several tens of thousands of votes. Irrespective of the Prosecutor’s Office decision, the special parliamentary committee established to investigate into the matter will keep working.

Here is the chairman of the Legal Committee of the Chamber of Deputies, the Social Democrat Eugen Nicolicea: “As you know, the idea was that one could not carry on a parliamentary investigation if the prosecution in the same case started, or if the public prosecutor’s office is conducting an investigation too. Nobody said, though, that if there is no investigation conducted by the prosecutor’s office, the parliamentary investigation should be affected.”

From the very beginning, the media has described the parliamentary investigation as a perfectly democratic exercise, but also perfectly useless, and doubted the credibility of the one who set off the bomb in the first place. Arrested for involvement into a case of corruption, the author of the book “100% anti-Basescu” which speaks of his convictions in the early 2000s, Andronic subsequently changed his position and became a political adviser to the re-elected president himself. Heard by the special commission, he admitted he had nothing to add to what had already been discussed in the media and had no evidence that the elections were actually rigged. Hearings of prominent politicians and diplomats did not end in resounding revelations either. Pundits say that nothing can take Basescu’s presidential term back and nobody can turn Geoana into a head of state. The only predictable outcome of this situation is that Romanians will keep losing trust in a political class that has already been severely discredited.