Romania's ruling Liberals lose ground in the polls, Social Democrats and USR-PLUS go up

Romania's National Liberal Party (PNL) would get 32.6% of the votes in would-be general elections next week, only 10.9pp more than the Social Democrats (PSD), the main opposition party - according to the latest poll carried by IMAS for Europa FM.

The margin has narrowed significantly, compared to a 15.1pp in the previous poll in September.

The compression resulted from both the weakening of Liberals' score - for the first time after five months of steady improvement, and the better score posted by the Social Democrats (21.7%) after three months of decline. Notably, the third major political force - the reformist block USR-PLUS - recorded the best score since it was measured for the first time in July: 20.4%, 3.4pp more than one month earlier, G4media.ro reported.

The Liberals could thus form a robust ruling coalition with USR-PLUS. However, a robust score of the reformist block would complicate the negotiations between the two forces that do not always share the same vision on the needed reforms.

Moreover, the tensions between the two would-be allies have increased after USR-PLUS said one of its conditions for joining the ruling coalition would be to have a different prime minister than the current PM (and Liberal leader) Ludovic Orban.

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