Turnout: 52.50%
About this election
The 2024 Romanian parliamentary election, held on 1 December 2024, took place in the eye of a political storm — one week after the shock first round of the presidential election and days before that vote's annulment. The Social Democratic Party (PSD) again finished first with 21.96% of the Chamber vote, but the headline was the surge of the nationalist right: the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR) leapt to second place with 18.01%, and two further hard-right parties — S.O.S. Romania and the Party of Young People (POT) — entered Parliament for the first time. Together the three nationalist parties took close to a third of the seats, transforming the Romanian legislature and forcing the mainstream parties into a broad pro-European coalition to keep them from power.
The Chamber of Deputies (331 seats) and the Senate (134 seats) are elected by closed-list proportional representation in the 42 county and diaspora constituencies, using the d'Hondt method with a 5% threshold and reserved Chamber seats for national-minority groups. Holding the parliamentary election in the gap between the two presidential rounds — and amid revelations of foreign interference in the presidential campaign — gave the contest an unusually charged, unpredictable character.
The vote unfolded against a backdrop of inflation, a large budget deficit, and a wave of anti-establishment anger that the presidential first round had just laid bare. The PSD, governing in coalition with the PNL, held its base but at a much-reduced share. The PNL slumped to 13.20% and the reformist USR took 12.40%. AUR's 18.01% nearly doubled its 2020 result, and the entry of S.O.S. Romania (led by the firebrand MEP Diana Șoșoacă, 7.36%) and POT (6.46%, linked to Călin Georgescu) marked the fragmentation and radicalisation of the right. The UDMR again cleared the threshold with 6.33%. With the nationalist bloc excluded from coalition talks by all the mainstream parties, the PSD, PNL, USR and UDMR negotiated a pro-EU government; Marcel Ciolacu was narrowly confirmed as prime minister on 23 December 2024 on a slim 240-of-465 vote.
The fragile pro-European coalition governed under the shadow of the annulled presidential election and the looming May 2025 re-run. After that re-run and the resignation of Ciolacu, the government was reshaped under new leadership, but the parliamentary arithmetic — a mainstream bloc holding a slim majority against a large, energised nationalist opposition — defined a new and more polarised era in Romanian politics, in which AUR and its allies had become a permanent and formidable presence.
The timing of the 2024 parliamentary election was extraordinary: it fell on 1 December, one week after the shock presidential first round and five days before the Constitutional Court annulled that vote. Romanians thus cast their parliamentary ballots amid open uncertainty about whether they even had a president-elect, with the political establishment reeling and the nationalist right surging on a wave of anti-system anger. That charged atmosphere helped propel not just AUR but two further hard-right formations — Diana Șoșoacă's S.O.S. Romania and the Georgescu-aligned Party of Young People (POT) — into Parliament, splintering and radicalising the right and leaving the legislature more fragmented than at any point since 1990.
Faced with a nationalist bloc commanding close to a third of the seats, the mainstream parties responded with a de facto cordon sanitaire, refusing to govern with AUR or its allies. The result was a broad pro-European coalition uniting the historic rivals PSD and PNL with the reformist USR and the Hungarian UDMR — an arrangement that secured only the narrowest of majorities and rested on parties with little in common beyond a shared determination to keep the far right from power. The fragility of that coalition, confirmed by Marcel Ciolacu's slim 240-of-465 confirmation vote, set the tone for a tense and unstable parliament operating under the shadow of the unresolved presidential crisis.
The 2024 result reshaped the Romanian Parliament more profoundly than any election since the early 1990s. Three nationalist parties, AUR, S.O.S. Romania and POT, together commanded close to a third of the seats, ending the long duopoly of the Social Democrats and National Liberals and installing a large, permanent anti-system bloc at the heart of the legislature. The mainstream parties' response, a broad pro-European coalition stretching from the PSD to the reformist USR and the UDMR, secured only a wafer-thin majority and depended on cooperation between forces with little in common. Operating in the shadow of the annulled presidential election and the looming May 2025 re-run, the new parliament embodied a country whose politics had become at once more polarised, more fragmented and more unpredictable than at any time in its post-communist history.
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.