Failing political integration? Political polarisation and judicial authority in Romania

The Romanian Constitutional Court emerged in 1991, on the backdrop of a ‘constitutional moment’ aiming to legalize the post-communist political rule. The court has been portrayed as ‘civilising’ device pitted against the initial basic democratic consensus. While constitutional courts have become fashionable in the case of recent waves of democratization -in countries with robust party competition - (Ginsburg 2012; Ginsburg &Versteeg 2014), they remain primarily mechanisms of political integration and political compliance deeply embedded and conditioned by historical/political contexts (Grimm 2016). In the Romanian case, the institutionalization of the CC (together with the bootstrapped competencies acquired on the 2003 constitutional revision) seems to go hand and hand with unsettle political polarization, accusations of biases, and claims of politicization. This paper explores the relationship between law and politics by re-tracing the political conflicts surrounding the composition and activity of the Romanian Constitutional Court. The research builds on parliamentary discourses to identify the main points of contention in dealing with the court’s constitutional adjudication in setting the understandings of constitutional boundaries (Weingast 1997; Vanberg 2015). The research will argue that while the CCR has become more autonomous and active player in moderating political disputes, the CCR’s judicial authority has been subjected to increased political pressures particularly in times of political crises/occasional backsliding.