Iohannis and Dăncilă Win First Round of Romanian Presidential Election

Incumbent president Klaus Iohannis and Viorica Dăncilă will advance to the second round of the Romanian 2019 presidential election. (Romania Insider)

Klaus Iohannis, Romania’s incumbent president, and Viorica Dăncilă, leader of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and former Prime Minister, advanced to the second round of the Romanian 2019 presidential election on November 10. Romania Insider reports that the runoff election was called after no candidate obtained a majority, with Iohannis receiving 37.8 percent of the votes, Dăncilă taking 22.3 percent and Dan Barna, the USR-Plus alliance’s candidate, acquiring 14.9 percent.

Even though Iohannis defeated Dăncilă by a solid margin, DW reports that both candidates plan to campaign vigorously in the weeks leading up to the second round. “We have beaten the Social Democrats, but the war is not over, we have to take another step forward in two weeks," Iohannis told his supporters after the results of the first round were finalized,  

Dăncilă also reacted optimistically to the results, according to DW: "We are present in the second round, I thank those who voted with their hearts.” However, the former prime minister has little to be optimistic about after Iohannis received the valuable endorsement of the USR-Plus Alliance.

With the backing of the USR-Plus Alliance and the National Liberal Party (PNL), Iohannis is campaigning on his track-record of anti-corruption efforts in Romania’s government. In the five years since Iohannis took office, he has led a popular national referendum seeking to end emergency decrees, advocated for a ban on amnesty for graft crimes and increased the amount of investigations and prosecutions into government officials, according to the State Department. 

Iohannis’s fight against corruption poses a major threat to Dăncilă, whose party has been at the center of multiple corruption scandals, including most recently when PSD’s former president, Liviu Dragnea, was imprisoned after participating in a graft crime, Ziare reports. 

However, the one advantage Dăncilă has in the election is her party’s ability to bring its base to the polls, which won them a majority in the Romanian parliament in 2016, according to News.ro. As a result, Iohannis commented on the need for his party to reach out to more voters: “The PSD is attempting to get attention through all sorts of maneuvers ... I will focus on meeting the voters in the campaign for the second round.”

Despite this new tactic, Iohannis does not plan to attend a proposed debate with Dăncilă, News.ro reports. The PNL campaign team considers that the debate "would bring nothing extra" since both candidates positions are already well known.

Romania is also facing a decline in voter turnout which dropped to 49.02 percent in the first round of the election, which Romania Business Review notes is the lowest domestic turnout in 30 years. Despite this notable drop, a record 666,000 votes came from Romanian citizens living abroad, mainly in Italy, the UK and Germany.