半大統領制におけるルーマニア国家機関の対立

Abstract

In the study of semi-presidential systems, it has been claimed that there are often conflicts between the president and the prime minister. This hypothesis can also be applied to cases in Romania. However, in Romania, the outcomes of these conflicts have been varied. In the first two conflicts between the president and prime minister in 1991 and 1998, the prime ministers were forced to resign, while the two most recent cases in 2007 and 2012 led to the suspension of the president by parliament. Can all of these cases be explained by the same hypothesis about semi-presidential systems? If so, we may suppose that conflicts are merely changed in a formal sense from being between the president and prime minister to being between the president and parliament, and that the basic characteristics and structure of the conflicts between them remain essentially unchanged. However, if these cases cannot be explained by the institutional hypothesis alone, we may suppose that some structural change must have happened in recent Romanian politics. We argue that the latter is the case. What then is the structural change that has recently occurred in Romania’s politics? In order to answer this question, firstly, we review the variety of hypotheses on the relations between president and prime minister in semi-presidential systems, and examine their validity in relation to the cases in Romania. We confirm that these hypotheses could adequately explain the relations between president and prime minister in Romania until around the period of the country’s accession to the EU. However, we also observe that, after that period, the essential characteristics of relations between these state organs changed so profoundly that these hypotheses could no longer explain them. Secondly, as a first step to understanding how these relations had changed, we analyse the political process of the suspension of the president by the parliament and government in the summer of 2012, and we notice that the struggle over judicial independence developed in parallel with the conflicts between the president, prime minister, and parliament. Thirdly, we examine the political struggle over judicial independence, and discover that there were two forces struggling over it. One was the status-quo forces attempting to maintain the current structure of a politically-dependent judiciary which easily facilitated corruption, and the other was the forces attempting to restore the independence of the judiciary and reduce corruption. The balance of power between these two forces was overwhelmingly favourable for the former until around the time of Romania’s accession to the EU. Since then, however, the latter has started to gain strength, as Romania has sought to fulfil the conditions for the EU accession, such as judicial independence and the elimination of corruption. As policies for judicial independence and anti-corruption have been producing concrete results, the struggle between the competing forces also has been intensifying, including the struggle between the state organs of president, prime minister, and parliament. Therefore, the conflicts between these three state organs cannot be explained by an institutional analysis of the semi-presidential system alone. They should be also analysed from the point of view of structural conflicts over essential issues in Romanian politics as a whole.