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This is the sixth article in our series Trouble on the Far-Right.
As everywhere else in Eastern Europe, ever since the fall of the communist regime, Romania’s political system has experienced dramatic changes from one electoral cycle to another, starting off with what was considered to be an inflation of political parties at the beginning of the 1990’s and arriving today at what seems to approximate a two-party system, with the Social-Democratic Party (PSD) on the left and the National Liberal Party (PNL) on the right side of the political spectrum. However, the fog surrounding the ideological identities of virtually all Romanian political parties has only intensified in time, leaving the party system in flux and creating the idea that there are no significant differences between the major political players. As was the case of many other countries, this situation has generated the (at least partial) success of a radical anti-establishment discourse. However, unlike other European countries, the far right in Romania did not benefit by the financial crisis...
For the first time in post-Communist Romania, the national legislative elections organized in December 2016 allow the citizens living abroad to cast their vote by regular mail. To use postal voting the voters had to register between May and September 2016 and numbers reveal that very few voters registered. This article analyzes the sources of information used by those who registered and the causes of those who did not register. We use data from a survey conducted between 18 September (a few days after registration was closed) and 4 October 2016 with 403 respondents. The results are not generalizable to the entire diaspora (since the sampling is not representative probabilistic) but they are informative and relevant to the understanding of the process. They show that that main sources of information for those who registered were online (Facebook and the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs), newspapers, and friends and acquaintances. At the same time, the absence of information about registration and the difficulty of procedures were the main reasons against the registration.