Romanian Elections
AS OF 2026-09-08 · 48 CONTESTS · presidential, 4 and 18 May 2025 · WIKIPEDIA, NATIONAL ELECTORAL AUTHORITIES
Next election · parliamentary, expected December 2028 · Capital · Bucharest in the metro rankings →
Where the chamber sits · 6.3 of 10, left to right, spread 1.7 →
Romania's legislative record from the censitary kingdom's 1901 vote to the December 2024 Chamber election, and its presidential record from the two-round republic's founding vote in 1990: three electoral colleges and a tiny franchise, an electoral-bonus law that broke in 1937, a royal dictatorship's single list, a falsified 1946 count, four decades of unopposed communist ritual, and a presidential election annulled by the courts and re-run within a year.
Source: Wikipedia election articles · as of 2026-09-08
Chamber seats
331
elected by party-list PR since 1990
Elections since 1901
48
May 2025
Nicușor Dan
won the runoff re-run after 2024's annulment
Presidential elections
Every direct Romanian presidential election on record here, newest first, from Ion Iliescu's one-round win in 1990 to the annulled and re-run contest of 2024-2025. 1990 to 2004 are drawn from the general-election articles that carried the presidential vote in the same infobox as Parliament; every contest from 2009 has its own dedicated article.
The directly elected presidency · 1990-
The presidency has been directly elected since Ion Iliescu's one-round win in May 1990; every contest since 1992 has used a two-round system that sends the top two finishers to a runoff whenever nobody clears a majority outright first time. The office sits alongside a prime minister who runs the government day to day but controls foreign and defence policy and can dissolve Parliament under specific conditions, the semi-presidential design the 1991 constitution settled on.
Legislative elections
Every Romanian legislative election on record here, newest first: the narrow-franchise electoral colleges of the constitutional kingdom, Greater Romania's electoral-bonus-law democracy, the royal dictatorship's single list, the falsified 1946 vote, communist Romania's unopposed National Front, and the two-round multiparty republic since 1990. This page reports the Chamber of Deputies throughout; several articles print the Senate's table first, and this series does not follow them there.
The post-1989 republic · 1990-
Romania's first free vote since the war returned a Parliament and a president together in May 1990, and competitive multiparty politics has run continuously since, through six-odd governing coalitions and several minority governments. Turnout has fallen from the near-universal levels of 1990 to the low fifties by 2024, the year far-right parties took roughly a fifth of the vote between them for the first time.
Social Democratic Party 86Alliance for the Union of Romanians 63National Liberal Party 49
Social Democratic Party 110National Liberal Party 93USR PLUS 55
Social Democratic Party 154National Liberal Party 69Save Romania Union 30
Social Liberal Union 273Right Romania Alliance 56People's Party – Dan Diaconescu 47
Democratic Liberal Party 115Alliance PSD+PC 114National Liberal Party 65
National Union PSD+PUR 132Justice and Truth Alliance 112Greater Romania Party 48
Social Democratic Pole of Romania 155Greater Romania Party 84Democratic Party 31
Romanian Democratic Convention 122Party of Social Democracy in Romania 91Social Democratic Union (PSDR–PD) 53
Democratic National Salvation Front 117Romanian Democratic Convention 82National Salvation Front 43
National Salvation Front 263Democratic Alliance of Hungarians in Romania 29National Liberal Party 29
The communist single list · 1948-1985
From 1948 a single National Front list, later renamed the Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy, ran unopposed at every election; turnout and the yes vote were both reported above 90% every time, and seat totals moved only when the legislature itself changed size. There was no rival candidate on the ballot and no possibility the ruling party could lose.
Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy 369
Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy 369
Front of Socialist Unity 349
Front of Socialist Unity 465
People's Democratic Front 465
People's Democratic Front 465
People's Democratic Front 437
Romanian Workers Party 428
Romanian Workers Party 190Ploughmen's Front 126National Popular Party 43
The falsified election of 1946 · 1946
No election was held during the war years. When Romania voted again in November 1946, the Soviet-backed government of Petru Groza ran the count, and Wikipedia's own account, drawing on Romanian and Soviet-archive historians alike, describes widespread intimidation and outright fraud that inflated the governing bloc's declared 69.8% well past what independent estimates suggest it actually won. Within two years the main opposition parties were dissolved, the king was forced to abdicate, and Romania became a one-party state.
The royal dictatorship's single list · 1939
King Carol II abolished party politics in 1938 and folded every legal party into the National Renaissance Front; by the time voters went to the polls in June 1939, opposition parties were banned outright and the Front was the only name on the ballot. It took 100% of the vote in a system that also raised the voting age and sorted the electorate into occupational groups rather than one national body of voters.
Greater Romania and the electoral bonus · 1919-1937
Universal male suffrage arrived with the postwar union of Transylvania, Bessarabia and Bukovina, and the opposition Romanian National Party actually won the first vote, in 1919. From 1926 an electoral bonus law handed any party clearing 40% of the national vote an automatic majority of seats, and it was almost always the party running the interior ministry that cleared it: the 1922 article's own account has army officers campaigning inside polling stations for the governing National Liberals. The system ran out of road in 1937, when nobody reached 40%, no coalition would form, and King Carol II handed the government to the fourth-placed, avowedly antisemitic National Christian Party instead.
National Liberal Party 152National Peasants' Party 86Everything for the Country Party 66
National Liberal Party 300National Peasants' Party 29Peasants' Party–Lupu 11
National Peasants' Party–German Party 274National Liberal Party 28National Liberal Party–Brătianu 14
National Union 289National Peasants' Party 30National Liberal Party–Brătianu 12
National Peasants' Party 348Magyar Party 16National Liberal Party 13
National Liberal Party 318National Peasants' Party 54Hungarian German Bloc 15
People's Party-led alliance 292National Peasant Bloc 69National Liberal Party 16
National Liberal Party 227Peasants' Party 40People's Party 12others 83
People's Party 206Romanian National Party 27Peasants' Party 25
Romanian National Party 169National Liberal Party 103Bessarabian Peasants' Party 72
The censitary kingdom · 1901-1918
The Chamber of Deputies was elected through three separate electoral colleges of wealth and profession, one for large landowners and urban notables, one for lesser urban property holders, and one for the peasants who made up most of the population but held only a sliver of the vote. It was the government of the day that called each election and ran its machinery, not a neutral administration, and the franchise itself stayed a few percent of the population throughout. The last vote on this system, in 1918, was held under wartime German occupation with the National Liberal Party boycotting.
Conservative Party–Marghiloman 165People's League 4Conservative Party–Carp 2
National Liberal Party 143Conservative Party 21Conservative-Democratic Party 18
Conservative-Democratic Party 84Conservative Party 62National Liberal Party 35
National Liberal Party 90Conservative Party 10Disputed 2
The long arc in charts
Hover any point for the exact figure.
Turnout
Above 90% at every communist-era ritual and near-universal in 1990, falling to the low fifties by the 2020s as Romanian politics settled into an ordinary competitive multiparty pattern.
The largest party's seat share
A single list took every seat by definition under the royal dictatorship and communist rule. The electoral bonus law produced supermajorities for the governing party through most of Greater Romania; no party has cleared even a third of the Chamber since 1990.
Records & superlatives
Highest presidential turnout
86.2%
1990, of the elections with a recorded figure
Lowest presidential turnout
51.2%
2019
Largest presidential win
85.1%
Ion Iliescu, 1990
Narrowest presidential win
22.9%
Călin Georgescu, 2024
Highest turnout
86.2%
1990, of the elections with a recorded figure
Lowest turnout
31.9%
2020
Highest vote share
79.3%
National Peasants' Party, 1928
Most seats won
348
National Peasants' Party, 1928
Largest legislative majority
379 of 414 seats
The Bloc of Democratic Parties and its allies, in the election historians describe as fraudulent.
Widest presidential margin
85.07%
Ion Iliescu's win in the first free postwar election, decided in a single round.
How Romanian elections work
Three franchises, one series
The censitary kingdom's three wealth-based colleges gave way to universal male suffrage in 1919, a single list under the royal dictatorship and communist rule from 1938 to 1989, and a genuinely competitive multiparty vote since 1990. Turnout and the freedom of the contest move together across the eras more than any single number in the tables does.
The 40% bonus that broke in 1937
Greater Romania's electoral law handed any party clearing 40% of the vote an automatic parliamentary majority, which is most of why interwar governments routinely won landslides they had organised themselves. In 1937 nobody reached the threshold, no coalition would form, and King Carol II gave the government to a fourth-placed, avowedly antisemitic party instead, a preview of the dictatorship that followed a year later.
A presidency chosen twice in one year
Călin Georgescu topped the first round of the November 2024 presidential election before the Constitutional Court annulled it over alleged Russian-linked social media interference; barred from the re-run, he was replaced on the ballot by George Simion, who led the new first round in May 2025 but lost the runoff to Nicușor Dan.
The Chamber, not the Senate
Several of the source articles from 1992 on print the Senate's results table before the Chamber of Deputies', the smaller of Parliament's two houses. This page reports the Chamber throughout, so its seat totals will not match a reader's memory of the Senate figures the same article leads with.