Turnout: 51.15%
About this election
The 2019 European Parliament election in Romania, held on 26 May 2019, was a heavy defeat for the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) and a milestone for the country's reformist and pro-European forces. The National Liberal Party (PNL) topped the poll with 27.00%, the PSD fell to 22.50%, and the newly formed USR-PLUS alliance came a close third with 22.36% — a remarkable result for a movement only a few years old. Held the same day as a referendum on the rule of law called by President Iohannis, and with turnout up sharply to 51.15%, the election was widely read as a popular rebuke of the PSD's assault on the anti-corruption framework.
Romania elects its members of the European Parliament by closed-list proportional representation in a single nationwide constituency, using the d'Hondt method with a 5% threshold. Because the whole country forms one constituency, European elections produce no county-level breakdown — voters everywhere choose from the same national lists — so this page reports the national result only, without a regional map. Romania held 32 seats in the 2019–2024 term, rising to 33 after the United Kingdom's departure from the EU redistributed seats.
The election came at the climax of the long struggle over the PSD government's efforts to weaken anti-graft laws. The concurrent referendum — in which Romanians overwhelmingly endorsed a ban on amnesties for corruption offences — amplified the anti-government mood. The PNL's first-place finish and USR-PLUS's surge to over 22% (winning 8 seats) confirmed a decisive shift of the urban and diaspora electorate toward the pro-European centre-right and reformist camp. PRO Romania (the breakaway led by former PM Victor Ponta), the PMP and the UDMR each won two seats. The day after the vote, the PSD's strongman Liviu Dragnea was sent to prison, compounding the party's rout.
The European result was the first in a sequence of defeats that would drive the PSD from power within months: a no-confidence motion toppled the Dăncilă government in October 2019, and Iohannis cruised to re-election in November. For USR-PLUS, the European breakthrough validated its strategy and propelled it toward government in the 2020 coalition. The 2019 vote thus marked a turning point, ending the PSD's dominance of the previous cycle and ushering in a period of centre-right and reformist ascendancy.
Since joining the EU in 2007, Romania has been one of the bloc's most pro-European member states at the level of public opinion, even as its governments have repeatedly clashed with Brussels over the rule of law. The European Commission monitored Romania's judiciary and anti-corruption efforts for years under a special Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, and the PSD governments' attempts to roll back anti-graft laws drew sharp warnings from European institutions. The 2019 European election therefore carried unusually high domestic stakes: a vote on Romania's European trajectory as much as on the allocation of its seats in Strasbourg, and one in which the pro-EU opposition could channel the anti-government mood of the streets directly into the ballot box.
President Iohannis sharpened those stakes by calling a national referendum on the same day, asking voters to endorse a ban on government amnesties and pardons for corruption offences and to bar the executive from altering criminal-justice legislation by emergency decree. Romanians backed both propositions overwhelmingly, turning the day into a double rebuke of the PSD's judicial agenda. The combination of the European result and the referendum delivered a crushing message to the governing party, and the imprisonment of its leader Liviu Dragnea the very next day made the rout complete — the opening act in a year that would end with the PSD swept from both the government and the presidency.
Beyond the rebuke to the governing party, the 2019 European election confirmed the arrival of a durable new force in Romanian politics. The USR-PLUS alliance, uniting the urban, anti-corruption Save Romania Union with the PLUS movement of the former prime minister and European commissioner Dacian Cioloș, surged to over 22% and eight seats, almost matching the long-dominant PSD. Its support was concentrated among younger, educated, city-dwelling and diaspora voters, a constituency the traditional parties had struggled to reach. The result demonstrated that the civic energy of the anti-corruption street protests could be converted into sustained electoral strength, and it propelled USR-PLUS toward national government in the 2020 coalition, cementing a three-way competition between social democrats, liberals and reformists that would structure the next phase of Romanian politics.
The 2019 vote sent a delegation that reflected Romania's deep partisan divisions to the European Parliament. The National Liberals and the People's Movement Party sat with the centre-right European People's Party, the Social Democrats and the breakaway PRO Romania with the Socialists and Democrats, and the USR-PLUS members with the liberal Renew Europe group, while the Hungarian UDMR continued its long association with the EPP. Romania's bloc of seats, among the larger national delegations, thus spread its weight across the parliament's main pro-European families, and the strong reformist and liberal showing in particular strengthened the centrist Renew group at a moment when it was positioning itself as kingmaker in the new parliament's balance of power.
Permanent Electoral Authority (Autoritatea Electorală Permanentă) and the Central Electoral Bureau (BEC) — roaep.ro.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.