Romanian Local Electoral System

INTRODUCTION

"Laws, in their broadest meaning, are the necessary relationships that derive from the nature of things; and in this respect, everything that exists has its laws. Divinity has its laws, the material world has its laws, human higher spiritual substances have their laws, animals have their laws, man has his laws. "

MONTESQUIEU

The starting point in choosing this topic was the future. Nowadays we can say without the risk of exaggerating, that, never before in his eventful history, man was so concerned about designing an image that is relevant for the future. Future is a multidisciplinary term. It is obsessive for political scientists, for sociologists and lawyers, for moralists and historians. The perspective of social and individual development begins to concern more and more social groups, especially young generations.

And because we are humans we aim at both our interior, spiritual development and at the exterior, material one. All this suggested, asked and basically urged me to try a deep study and comprehension of human rights. By thousands of connections which I only suspected in the beginning, they related to society, the political system and democracy Present and future as I wanted it to be, the theme is very realistic and I felt that I needed a general approach, and why not a valuable one for understanding the inevitable difficulties in the evolution of the Romanian society in a period full of virtues of evolution.

The electoral system is a key area of society and how it is managed and carried out, reflects the stage of democracy.

By it the governing bodies are elected and that is why it is so important it should be held in a correct, transparent and democratic way.

The electoral system is essentially designed for the citizens and it must represent their interests, which we must admit is not always the case in real life.

Romania passed nearly 20 years ago from an electoral system based on the truncated representation of the voters’ will to an electoral system based on political pluralism and constitutional democracy safeguards to ensure the freedom of voting in terms of effective guarantee of free expression of the will of voters in the appointment of their representatives.

The defining feature of the Romanian electoral system is the insufficient political education of the voters that manifested itself in time, either by low voters’ participation, or by their manipulation by the political class.

The paper contains both the theoretical and the legal framework of the electoral system. It is divided into three chapters, each attracting attention by its importance.

The first part includes a “x-ray” of the Romanian citizens’ electoral rights.

I referred, first, briefly to the period before the 1989 Revolution, which has seen many changes and nuances, and secondly to the period which followed. As for the period before 1990, references are quite poor, but I believe that the issues I am going to discuss are sufficient to create ourselves an image of the electoral "old” system - if we can call it so, including many limitations and restrictions of citizens’ rights.

I presented the poll, paying attention to local elections, presenting the advantages and disadvantages involved. Organization and the elections’ conduction, is a part that I treated in particular, according to their purpose and objective because I think they were held under the impulse of true democracy, to which we aspired.

Elections are a very complex event. From their study we can draw interesting conclusions concerning the effect of any changes to the electoral system.