{"id":960041,"date":"2025-12-08T14:00:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T12:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rri.ro\/?p=960041"},"modified":"2025-12-08T13:24:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T11:24:00","slug":"by-election-in-romania","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rri.ro\/en\/news-and-current-affairs\/today-in-the-news\/by-election-in-romania-id960041.html","title":{"rendered":"By-election in Romania"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Citizens of Bucharest went to the polls on Sunday to cast their ballot for the 12<sup>th<\/sup> 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.<\/p>\n<p>A close ally of Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan, and the mayor of the capital\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>After the returns were published, Ciprian Ciucu said:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ciprian Ciucu:<\/strong> <em>\u201dWe 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.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Anca Alexandrescu came second in Sunday\u2019s election with roughly 22% of the votes; she was backed by the populist, ultranationalist opposition AUR. The Democrat Daniel B\u0103lu\u021b\u0103 came third in the race with nearly 21%. Fourth was C\u0103t\u0103lin Drul\u0103 of the USR with 14 percent followed by Ana Ciceal\u0103 of SENS with 6%. Turnout in the aforementioned election failed to reach 33%. Bucharest hasn\u2019t 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 \u2018the upper hand in a fragile pro-European ruling coalition, and handing a defeat to a hard-right contender tipped to win\u2019, Reuters say.<\/p>\n<p>According to the aforementioned agency, \u2018the 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\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>Reuters also recalls that Sunday\u2019s election took place one year after Romania cancelled a presidential election on suspicion of Russian interference that favoured a far-right frontrunner.<\/p>\n<p>Local by-election rounds for mayor seats also took place on Sunday in 12 other localities in Romania, while in Buzau county, the country\u2019s 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,\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<p>(bill)<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":959881,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37738],"tags":[181741,181742,35909,180786,181712,144285,32140],"coauthors":[113282],"class_list":["post-960041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-today-in-the-news","tag-ana-ciceala-en","tag-anca-alexandrescu-en","tag-aur","tag-by-election","tag-ciprian-ciucu-en","tag-mayor-seat","tag-nicusor-dan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>By-election in Romania - Radio Romania International<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rri.ro\/en\/news-and-current-affairs\/today-in-the-news\/by-election-in-romania-id960041.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"By-election in Romania - Radio Romania International\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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