Two kept promises

It’s a pity that politicians keeping their promises should count as news, but two recent cases are worth commenting on.

Firstly, in Romania, which has a new prime minister: Social Democrat Marcel Ciolacu took office three weeks ago, replacing Nicolae Ciucă, from the centre-right National Liberal Party (PNL). But this doesn’t represent the overthrow of the old government; the two parties are in a grand coalition, and agreed from the outset that they would rotate in the prime ministership.

The agreement between them dates to November 2021, when it brought an end to a couple of months of political deadlock. I noted at the time that “The plan is that Ciucă will give way to a Social Democrat prime minister in the middle of 2023, but a lot could happen before then.” My scepticism, though, turned out to be unjustified; Ciucă duly resigned (a couple of weeks late, due to a teachers strike), the Social Democrats nominated Ciolacu in his place, and the government continued more or less as before.

Not quite as before, since UDMR, the party of the ethnic Hungarian minority, left the coalition over a dispute over the allocation of ministries. But the Social Democrats and PNL still have a large majority without them, with 289 of the 466 seats. Barring the unexpected, the coalition seems set to survive until the next election, scheduled for the end of next year.

Many arrangements for rotation in office or other orderly succession come to grief when the party that gets the first turn decides to rat on the deal when it’s time to yield to the other partner, so it’s good to see that the PNL has done the right thing. As president Klaus Iohannis (an independent but aligned with the PNL) put it, “Romanians were promised stability and they are getting stability.”

Whether it’s a good thing for Romanian democracy is another question; grand coalitions can make it harder for voters to exercise meaningful choice, and there are persistent criticisms that this one has been a cloak for increased authoritarianism [link added].

The other news is from Senegal, where incumbent president Macky Sall announced on Monday that he would be stepping down next year at the end of his second term of office rather than attempting to seek re-election. Presidents are limited to two terms, but Sall had previously equivocated on the question, and an argument had been made (this might sound familiar) that a constitutional revision in 2016 had reset the clock.

Sall’s announcement made no concession on the legality, but said that “Even if I have the right, I felt that my duty is not to contribute to destroying what I have built for this country.” He added that “Senegal is more than just me, it’s full of people capable of taking Senegal to the next level.”

To act otherwise would have been more than usually hypocritical, since Sall won the job in 2012 by beating then-president Abdoulaye Wade, who had already served two terms and had argued on a similar technicality that the limit did not apply to him. The voters weren’t impressed, and elected Sall with a comfortable 65.8% in the second round; he was re-elected in 2019 with 58.3% in the first round. (Presidential terms were reduced from seven years to five as part of the 2016 revision.)

Senegal has traditionally been one of the most successful democracies in West Africa, but that status has been under threat, particularly with the arrest and conviction of opposition leader Ousmane Sonko. Sall deserves some credit for doing the right thing now, but he could have avoided a lot of trouble by being clear about his intentions from the start.

It’s also possible that this won’t end the controversy, since a very similar announcement in 2020 by president Alassane Ouattara of nearby Ivory Coast proved to be illusory; after the death of the replacement candidate, Ouattara changed his mind and sought re-election later that year. The opposition boycotted the poll and he won with a huge majority.