BUCHAREST — More than a month after its government collapsed, Romania still does not have a new one, and on Thursday its president tried to break the deadlock the only way he had left: by reaching outside parliament altogether for a prime minister.
Nicusor Dan, the pro-European centrist who won the presidency a year ago after a chaotic, twice-run election, nominated his own adviser, Eugen Tomac, to form a government. Tomac, a 44-year-old member of the European Parliament who leads a small party with no seats in Romania’s own legislature, now has ten days to assemble a cabinet and survive a confidence vote.
Because the parties do not agree with each other, the only possible solution is a prime minister who is independent of the parties in Parliament, Dan said, explaining a choice that is less a show of strength than an admission of how thoroughly the country’s politics have seized up, according to Xinhua.
Tomac has said he will offer parliament a technical government, not a political one, a cabinet of specialists rather than party figures. It is the formula presidents reach for when the parties cannot agree on anything except that they will not serve under one another.
The crisis began in early May, when the broad pro-European coalition that had governed Romania since the election fractured. Its largest member, the leftist Social Democrats, withdrew its support for Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan and joined the very force the coalition had been built to keep out, the hard-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians, in a no-confidence motion that passed with 281 votes, well above the 233 required.
That alliance of convenience, between the establishment left and the nationalist right, tells the story of Romanian politics since the presidential vote. The Social Democrats, long the country’s dominant party, have chafed at sharing power with the reformists and liberals who entered government on a promise to clean it up. The far right, riding the same anti-establishment current that nearly won it the presidency, has been happy to help.
The cost of the deadlock is mounting. Without a functioning government, Romania cannot pass the budget measures its EU commitments require, and access to billions in European funds has been put at risk. The leu has slid to record lows against the euro, and the policymaking the country needs to address an inflation rate near 11 percent has simply stopped, Bloomberg reported.
Bolojan remains in office as a caretaker, able to keep the lights on but not to govern, while the parties that brought him down have shown no greater ability to agree on a replacement. Dan spent weeks shuttling party leaders through the Cotroceni Palace in search of a candidate who could command a majority. None could.
Tomac is his answer, and a revealing one. A self-described pro-European who sits with the centrist Renew group in Brussels, he is close enough to Dan to be trusted and far enough from the warring parties to be, in theory, acceptable to all of them. Whether that distance is an asset or a fatal weakness will be settled in the confidence vote, because a prime minister with no parliamentary base depends entirely on the forbearance of parties that have just demonstrated they will withdraw it.
Romania’s turmoil is its own, rooted in the annulled 2024 election and the hard-right surge that followed, but it rhymes with a wider pattern across the region. In Warsaw a nationalist president has paralysed a reformist government by veto; in Budapest a reformist government is dismantling the apparatus of the strongman it replaced. Across Central and Eastern Europe, the contest between liberal and nationalist forces has settled into a grinding institutional stalemate that no single election seems able to resolve.
If Tomac fails, Dan’s options narrow sharply. The constitution allows the president only so many attempts before the alternative becomes dissolution and fresh elections, a prospect that alarms the pro-European camp precisely because the far right is polling strongly and an early vote could hand it the leverage it has so far been denied.
For now the country waits. A caretaker keeps a seat warm, an adviser with no party tries to build a government out of technocrats, and the parties that engineered the vacuum calculate whether a stranger’s cabinet serves them better than the elections everyone says they do not want. Romania has a president, a parliament and, for the moment, no one able to govern between them.
