“Why Can’t We Be Friends?” The Coalition Potential of Presidents in Semi-presidential Republics—Insights from Romania

Introduction

Political parties and political elites do not exist in a vacuum. The role of institutions in government formation is also expected to shape to a great extent their underlying attitudes. ¹ The present article examines the effect of the power of the president in a semi-presidential institutional design in shaping governments. Previous research on coalitions rarely addressed this topic. ² Most commonly, the particular role of the president is studied as part of the greater theory on presidential politics. ³ This investigation unites some of the findings in the two subfields of political research and disputes recent conclusions that presidents in European democracies have a substantial ability to induce their preferred governments. ⁴

The study presents the aggregated results of observations made in a young, consolidating, semi-presidential European democracy which could be considered a fertile ground for the presidentialization of politics ⁵ and provides the conditions for a president to influence coalition outcomes. However, the findings generated surprising insights by showing this conclusion is rather the exception than the rule and requires certain conditions to be met. Overall, when the president and prime minister (or a plausible designate prime minister of a presidentially “unfriendly” majority) enter a competition to shape a coalition in this institutional format, they enter as equals. The weight of their supporting parties makes the difference in deciding the winner.

More generally, the findings have larger implications for research on coalition studies and presidential power by supporting the inadequacy of the parliamentary/semi-presidential categorization of regime types. ⁶ Given the less than common situations when the particular interference of a president in semi-presidential regimes can make a difference in coalition outcomes, the article advocates that to understand the relationship between this institution and the overall process of coalition management, the two types of regimes can be jointly analysed, with only marginal references to the exclusive powers of the president.

Firstly, the case of Romania questions the extent to which having as a bargaining chip the exclusive prerogative of nominating the prime minister ⁷ is a crucial source of influence in coalition government formation. ⁸ Although legally considered to shed political parti pris once in office, the president’s bias towards his or her party of origin is expected. This briefly provides the presidential party the informal role of the driving force behind coalition formation and informally increases its appeal towards the undecided smaller parties who can swing their support either way. But the success of this control is subject to the actual weight of the party behind the nomination. Although the prime ministerial nomination is indeed the president’s “moment of glory,” this study relativizes the weight in negotiations of this particular prerogative. The importance allotted to his or her isolated influence in shaping the cabinet decreases even further when extending the observed cases to cabinet formations that are not necessarily tied to a change of prime minister. ⁹

Choosing to study a country with only twenty-six years of democratic experience is also motivated by the need to increase our knowledge of the less studied group of post-communist countries and test their potential for similar reactions to institutional rules as older democracies. While it is generally acknowledged that diversifying our choice of case studies is more valuable for knowledge, researchers are still shy to make this inclusive effort, mainly for lack of data.

Finally, one of the main reasons for an in-depth qualitative study is that scholarly literature provides insufficient accounts for the informal aspects of presidential authority in government formation or quantifies it in rough terms. ¹⁰ Through elite interviews, ¹¹ we could better understand the impact of this volatile factor. Although there are limitations linked to respondents’ subjectivity when asked about the direct involvement of the president in off-the-record negotiations for government formation, including accounts of firsthand participants is a valuable addition to our understanding.

To present the evidence found, I started with an overview of all twenty coalition cabinets in the democratic history of Romania (1990–2016). I distinguished between cases when coalition cabinets and presidents were in a situation of partnership (whether the president and the prime minister were from the same party or not) and cases of coalition cabinets and presidents in a situation of conflict (Table 1). I proceeded to select a case where the president played an important role in government formation and could make use of his prerogative to name the prime minister from his loyal party, which thus became a formateur, and compared it with one where he could not (Romania has only had male presidents). I thus emphasise how, in the end, the coalition appeal of the party behind the president makes the final difference in government formation, regardless of his or her exclusive prerogative to name the prime minister.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1

Partnership and Conflict between Romanian Presidents and Coalition Cabinets

	Partnership
	President and PM from the Same Party		President and PM Not from the Same Party (Including Technocrat PMs)			Conflict
Presidents	Iliescu	Băsescu	Iliescu	Constantinescu	Băsescu	Băsescu	Iohannis
Coalition Cabinets	Văcăroiu II (1994–1996); Năstase I (2000–2003);	Boc I (2008– 2009); Boc III (2009–2010); Boc IV (2010–2012)	Stolojan (1991–1992); Isărescu (1999–2000)	Ciorbea I (1996–1997); Ciorbea II (1997–1998); Ciorbea III (1998); Vasile I (1998); Vasile II (1998–1999) a	Popescu-Tăriceanu I (2004–2006); Ungureanu (2012)	Popescu-Tăriceanu II (2006–2007); Popescu-Tăriceanu III (2007–2008); Ponta I (2012); Ponta II (2012–2014); Ponta III (2009–2010); Ponta IV (2014)	Ponta V (2014–2015)

a.

In 1999, president Emil Constantinescu tried to dismiss Prime Minister Vasile. The 1991 Constitution, in place at that time, remained silent as to the possibility for the president to do this. The prime minister finally resigned and the 2003 Constitution clarified this issue in Article 107(2), which states that “the president cannot dismiss the prime minister.” However, conflict did not characterize the entirety of the life of the cabinet and does not fit the attributes of cohabitation. ⁴⁸

Presidential Powers and Coalition Politics

Semi-presidential regimes combine a popularly elected president with a prime minister and government accountable to the parliament. ¹² The potential for the president to develop an extreme personalization of the political process remains one of the major critiques of this regime type as a positive framework for democracy building. ¹³ According to the provisions of the 1991 Constitution to which minimal changes were made in 2003, Romania fits the definition of a semi-presidential republic in which the executive power is shared between a popularly elected president and the government. Early studies identified it as such. ¹⁴ Later, Samuels and Shugart included Romania in the category of premier-president democracies. ¹⁵ Such studies conceive the parliament as a unitary actor and would benefit from the added perspective of coalition studies that rather see it as a collection of different party interests. A better insight would also come from an improved scholarship that no longer considers the powers of the president in government formation separately from the weight of his or her supportive party. The findings of the present study reinforce this line of research.

Secondly, the semi-presidential regime is claimed to contain the seed of conflict in situations of a divided executive as a result of the dual legitimacy it allows (i.e., cohabitation) ¹⁶ or when there is a divided minority government when no particular actor enjoys a legislative majority. ¹⁷ The already tense situation of coalition formation bargaining thus has the potential of being enhanced. In such an institutional design which demands elite consensus, the institutionally exclusive powers of the president, such as naming the prime minister, could indeed matter. But how much of a difference do they actually make? Bringing in the case of Romania, we will further see that the president’s weakness or strength comes from the weakness or strength of a loyal party in terms of coalition potential.

The present results complete previous findings framed from the perspective of coalition studies, in which semi-presidentialism was seen either as a form of parliamentary government ¹⁸ or as modified parliamentarism in which presidents are influencers, but less so than parliaments. ¹⁹ Other scholars claim that it could lean either way between presidents and parliaments in influencing governments. ²⁰ Going beyond the usual comparison between semi-presidential and parliamentary regime types equals an understanding of the powers of the president as an intervening variable, proving the use of this categorization was less productive. Recent scholarship proposes measurements of presidential powers to better understand potential movements of the regime. ²¹ Qualitative and case study elements are a welcome addition.

Countries such as Austria, Ireland, France, and Portugal, although fitting the definition of semi-presidential regimes above, are also treated as parliamentary systems in seminal coalition government studies. ²² Even in the case of France, the usual example of semi-presidentialism, when seeing things from the perspective of coalition shaping, evidence shows that “the latitude of the presidential action is, however limited by the result of legislative elections.” ²³ More generally, government formation is either seen as the result of negotiations between the prime minister and the president ²⁴ or between parliamentary parties and president. ²⁵ Going further than regime typologies by looking at how different actors play this important game of coalition formation has the potential to offer a better understanding of how the levers of power are ultimately divided and whether there is any shifting tendency towards more presidential power.

At the time of legislative elections, the Romanian president is perceived as a powerbroker in the negotiations for future governments. Yet while the president’s actions as an individual at important moments were more visible, evidence rather shows that the preferential relationship with his or her own party, although inhibited by the Romanian Constitution, is his or her locus of power. Among other features of the party system, the practice of this preferential relationship has made Romania, among Central and Eastern European countries, a likely case for the contingent presidentialization of political life. ²⁶ Nevertheless, what parties and citizens look at is less of an influencer than they believe it to be. Empirical observations show that irrespective of informal authority, the president is constrained by the mechanisms of a multi-party system to accumulate substantive power and induce a preferred government formed around a loyal party

As regulated by the fundamental law, the formation of the government involves both parliament and president (Art. 103). ²⁷ However, the practical interpretation of the provisions of the Constitution is more important to understanding the game of coalition formation than its formal readings. Political practice has also shown that the Constitution leaves room for ambiguity. ²⁸ While most issues are expected to be dealt with through consensus between government and president, on issues such as Romania’s representation at the European Council it was required of the Constitutional Court to make a decision between president and prime minister in favour of the former. ²⁹ Other powers of the president apart from nominating the prime minister include a few executive attributions: calling for national referenda; leading foreign and security policy; chairing the Supreme Council for National Defense (CSAT) (Art. 92); taking part in the cabinet sessions when matters related to national security or foreign policy are discussed and in all other sessions if invited by the prime minister; and if present, he or she presides over the sessions (Art. 87). The president is also involved in the nomination of some other key officials, such as the General Prosecutor. These attributes are either ceremonial or subject to consensuality after government formation.

No matter how politically powerful or personally uncompromising the president might be, he or she is superseded by the parliament on all potential decisions. If the president plays his or her cards in favour of a loyal party in government formation, he or she could maintain some control over government life. Yet even so, if there is a shift in the legislative majority and the presidential party loses control, the president is practically stripped of his or her major influence and can only have an impact through direct negotiations with the prime minister. He or she also becomes a potential subject of impeachment by an adverse majority. The dramatic outcomes with Romania’s experience with cohabitation (two impeachments against the same president in 2007 and 2012) as well as an increased fluidity in cabinet composition (twenty-seven cabinets in twenty-six years) make the country a fertile ground to test the strength of different political actors. Such tension-charged moments provide the platform for the display of informal authority and may wrongfully lead to the expectation that the president is more powerful than he or she formally is.

Presidential Powers and the Conditions for Informal Authority

Post-communist states compile attributes that provide the incentives for the personalization of power. Should the institutional configuration allow it, the president could also be a “beneficiary” of such developments. I hereby briefly go through the main reasons behind an expected trend of presidentialization of political life in one of these countries and present some of the evidence found against a substantial institutional power of the president to influence coalition outcomes.

Firstly, consolidation of institutionalization of the political life is found wanting. The problems mostly pointed out include the lack of mass partisanship, ³⁰ substantial electoral volatility, ³¹ weak party institutionalization, and their dependence on a leader or on a small group with contested standardised internal organisation ³² and internal fragmentation ³³ and/or lacking ideological programs, ³⁴ etc.

Another trait that usually undergoes scrutiny is the setup of clientelistic networks that overlap business interests with politics. ³⁵ To quote the findings of recent studies on Romania, “unlike parties in consolidated Western European democracies, the Romanian parties rely heavily in their candidate selection practices on very small and highly elitist groups of business managers” ³⁶ and “the Romanian parties display an uninterrupted oligarchic inertia.” ³⁷ This is associated with personalized patterns of recruitment that do not permit a standardization of hierarchical relationships and contribute to the increase of a leader’s authority with whom powerful businessmen are most likely to deal directly.

Thirdly, the starting point of Romanian democracy has led some authors to consider it as an “unfinished revolution.” ³⁸ Pridham and Lewis identified the new elites as looking “surprisingly like the ‘old’ elites.” ³⁹ Other studies noted how not only political elites refashioned themselves to look democratic, but oligarchs also adapted “to democratic arrangements when those arrangements begin to look durable and inevitable.” ⁴⁰ The option for a semi-presidential regime type was made by second-file members of the Communist Party, refashioned as the National Salvation Front (FSN) and then the Party of Social Democracy in Romania (PDSR). Frison-Roche, in his comparative study of countries that opted for a semi-presidential model, argues that the model was preferred because it was believed to guarantee the maintenance of power in the hands of the principal actors of the transition. ⁴¹ This was confirmed by one member in the leadership of the FSN, and a future PDSR junior minister and minister in subsequent cabinets:

After 1989, the National Salvation Front (FSN) won with an overwhelming majority. None of us even thought of the idea that a time might come when we needed to manage coalitions. It is also the reason why this [cohabitation] was not even considered when we wrote the Constitution. ⁴²

This perspective focuses on the conscious decision made by the agents of change at the time of the transition to build a system that accommodates both their interest in using the institutional framework to maintain the levers of power and those of the frail opposition parties and the society in seeing a change in the architecture of power. For the former, a total switch to a parliamentary system would have been too much to cope with and still maintain a significant upper hand. For the latter, a significant difference from a party system dependent on a single ruler was necessary to acknowledge a regime change.

Fourthly, the democratic evolution of post-communist states took place in a general trend of increased personalization of power and decreased party alignment in which the voters are to a great extent influenced by a party leader when casting their ballot. According to a study by Hayes and McAllister, “election outcomes are now, more than at any time in the past, determined by voters’ assessment of party leaders.” ⁴³ This is a plausible and much supported thesis especially by researchers interested in the advancement of political communication who notice a move towards “media-centred democracies.” ⁴⁴ Although so far the focus of such studies has mostly been the United States and Western Europe, similar effects can be witnessed throughout younger democracies, including Romania. At the same time, the influence of media channels and, more often than not, their partisan politics have increased considerably, proportional with the concern for the public image of the leader, who becomes even more open to scrutiny. When taking place in an environment of questionable reform towards meeting European Union standards concerning the freedom of the press, ⁴⁵ this situation can have a destabilizing effect on the whole balance of power between parties at the time of negotiations, as the centres of power can be independent of party.

For these reasons and perhaps others, the transition to a new constitutional order has been the terrain for struggles among sharers of influence for more executive authority. After the drafting of the new democratic Constitution in 1990, experts were even unsure of how to classify Romania among the different variants of parliamentary systems adopted by the other post-communist countries. ⁴⁶ The dominant party of the first seven years of its democratic life and the same president with a strong connection to his own party were also the crafters of the new constitutional order that left room for ambiguity in the division of power between president and prime minister.

These tensions became evident as coalitions became a necessity. With all their obduracy and authority within weakly institutionalized parties, presidents have proven to be a less resilient regulator of political life than coalition politics. In order to have any influence on the circumstances of political life, the president has to become a player in coalition building strategies as the Constitution leaves some space for manoeuvre by providing the incentives to craft a parliamentary majority that is loyal to him or her. However, most of the capital the president gathers to this end is of informal origin. When the president did not have a supportive legislative, he was forced to get involved in forging coalitions from an assumed role of party leader. Despite a persistent tradition of informality, institutionally driven patterns of the behaviour of parties and presidents can be identified. This comes in support of more recent studies that attest that “transitions in vastly different circumstances still created institutions that constrain or encourage government behaviour in predictable and consistent manners.” ⁴⁷

A Two-Way Street: The Presidential Party–President Relationship

For a comprehensive within-case look, I started the analysis with an overview of all coalition cabinets in the democratic history of Romania (1990–2016). As seen in Table 1, situations of an adversarial president and coalition cabinet are identified as instances of cohabitation and publically traceable open conflict between president and prime minister (and implicitly between president and the coalition behind the prime minister). Unsurprisingly, in all situations of partnership, the party of the president was in government, even though president and prime minister were not necessarily from the same party.

This summary is a useful step towards a further identification of the conditions under which the president can be an influencer in the shaping of coalitions. I continue to briefly compare the two categories and then select two representative cases for a thick analysis: one in which the president had the conditions to influence the shape of a coalition cabinet and one in which he did not.

In cases of conflict, the president was successfully impeached twice by the legislative coalition behind the prime minister (during Popescu-Tăriceanu III and Ponta I). As mentioned above, the Constitution does not permit the president’s influence alone to topple cabinets. The dismissal of Prime Ministers Popescu-Tăriceanu and Ponta through a motion of no confidence could not be achieved as president Băsescu, together with his party the Democrat Party (PD) (renamed Liberal Democrat Party [PDL]), could not muster more partners in parliament than his hostile prime ministers and their respective parties. The prime ministers resisted through a network of open or secret alliances. Popescu-Tăriceanu (chair of the National Liberal Party [PNL]) finished a four-year mandate (2004–2008) without being subjected to a motion of no-confidence with a minority cabinet by having the publicly unacknowledged legislative support of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) for the last year of his mandate. ⁴⁹

Ponta also stayed in office for three years and 165 days (2012–2015), outliving by almost a year president Băsescu into the term of the following president, Iohannis. The cabinet composition was changed three times and Ponta even ran for presidential elections against Iohannis. While losing these elections, he stayed on as prime minister, as the support of the legislative majority did not shift in favour of the newly elected president. In brief, in situations of established “conflict” between president and government, the institution of the presidency has no exclusive advantage in reshaping majorities.

When in a similar competition for legislative majorities, the conditions change and the president has the chance to nominate the prime minister (following a resignation, elections, a successful motion of no confidence against a cabinet, etc.); this provides the president with the upper hand. Yet even then, the coalition potential of the competing parties makes the final difference. From among the situations of “partnership,” these observations can be made in the case of the formation of Boc III and Popescu-Tăriceanu I. In these situations, the composition of the coalitions was a direct result of the simultaneous fulfilment of the two conditions: the president had his institutional upper hand in nominating the prime minister of his choice and his own party had a higher coalition appeal than its direct competitor. In the rest of the cases in the “partnership” columns, the influence of the president is less discernible, as his party’s appeal for coalition formation was not firmly challenged. In other words, in these instances, we cannot isolate the president’s altering effect over the composition of the coalition.

To complete this analysis, I proceed by selecting a case where the president played an important role in government formation and could make use of his prerogative to name the prime minister (Popescu-Tăriceanu I) and one where he could not (Ponta I and by extension Ponta II, a coalition cabinet with the same composition). I emphasise how, in the end, the coalition appeal of the party behind the president makes the final difference, regardless of the opportunity to name the prime minister. The two cases are interdependent and they open and close the segment of observations dedicated to the practical experiments with the power of the president in Romania. The personal success of the president in crafting the Popescu-Tăriceanu I cabinet in late 2004 (followed by a similar involvement in the formation of Boc III in 2009) led to increased expectations that the president would also influence the formation of the 2012 cabinet following the successful motion of no confidence against the presidentially supported Ungureanu cabinet (27 April 2012). While having the same powers of appointment as in 2004 (and 2009), this did not happen. The major difference was the severe drop in the coalition appeal of his support party, the PDL.

Conclusions

The main theoretical implications of these findings contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between the institution of the president and coalition building. The study shows that although a president finds within the semi-presidential system the institutional incentives to try to increase his or her influence in government formation, he or she remains firmly limited by the coalition potential of his or her party, regardless of context-driven peaks of increased informal authority. Should we not look at this relationship, we may miss important factors in trying to explain both why certain coalitions form and in clarifying trends of potential presidentialization.

Secondly, although scholars tend to differentiate between semi-presidential and parliamentary regimes in choosing cases for comparative analysis, there is reason to go beyond this categorization when analysing coalition formation and administration. In the universe of cases, the powers of the president could be greater in one institutional scenario (e.g., the constitutionally ambiguous freedom of choice for a nomination of the prime minister), but when it comes to government formation, it is more likely to understand the process by following negotiations between parliamentary parties. As shown, under certain circumstances presidents could play an influential role in government formation, but these are rather the exception than the rule. In the legislative, the president may be an informal influencer under the condition that his or her party has the coalition potential to outmanoeuvre the opposition. Further investigations aiming to understand to what extent the institutional design may constrain the presidentialization of politics would benefit from qualitative research into the informal authority of the president. Such inferences would also be of use in studying more generally the personalization of politics and its limitations.

Using the Romanian example, a democratizing post-communist fertile ground for the presidentialization of politics, I reveal that even in this situation, the inherent structural incentives for coalition building dissuaded individual power accumulation in the long run. This contributes to the weakening of the theory that semi-presidential systems are inherently affected by a process of growing presidentialization. However, as only the president’s influence in shaping coalitions was investigated in this research, further comparative research into his or her role in other areas such as portfolio distribution or agenda setting is needed to strengthen this claim.