Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase has claimed victory in today’s parliamentary elections after exit polls showed his Social Democrats (PSD) looked set to remain the biggest party.
Exit polls put support for the PSD, a party of reformed communists which took Romania to the threshold of EU membership, with between 38.9 and 40.1% of the vote.
About 18 million voters cast their ballots at 17,000 polling stations from the Carpathians to the Black Sea, to choose between the ruling ex-communist PSD and a centrist alliance of the Liberal and Democrat parties.
Romania and Bulgaria are scheduled to be the EU's next eastward enlargement, but Bucharest has been slower to reform and may be delayed by a year if it does not catch up with Sofia.
