Septimius Pârvu

ro_RO Română · Linkedin · Facebook · ·

Septimius Pârvu is an expert in good governance and elections at Expert Forum. He has over 11 years of experience in coordinating projects related to active citizenship, education, election monitoring and political clientelism. He is an experienced trainer and has coordinated since 2012 the School for Democracy, a program dedicated to young civic activists and teachers from Romania and the Republic of Moldova.

Since 2009 he has participated as an expert or coordinated several election monitoring campaigns in Romania and internationally. Between 2012 and 2020, he coordinated 11 election observation campaigns, attended by more than 6,000 internal observers. Septimius has international electoral experience in countries such as the Republic of Moldova, Slovakia, Lithuania, Malta, Latvia or Denmark. In 2015 he observed the use of Internet voting in Estonia and has an extensive experience related to the use of alternative voting methods. He has constantly collaborated with international organizations such as the Council of Europe or the OSCE / ODIHR. Since 2021 he is a member of the National Coordination Committee of the Partnership for Open Government in Romania.

Septimius analyzes political clientelism, the financing of political parties and election campaigns, and has published a significant number of reports on these topics. Within the program dedicated to political financing, he developed the only platform in Romania that includes data on the history of financing political parties and electoral campaigns in the last 15 years – www.banipartide.ro. For several years he has been coordinating the program related to political clientelism, with an emphasis on the implementation of investment programs for local administration such as PNDL, constantly publishing articles and developing the only interactive platform that reflects the implementation of the latter.

Septimius graduated with a master’s degree in European and Romanian Politics from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest.

Relevant publications

Report and video: The financing of political parties in 2022

  Read the full report (Romanian only). The updated database is available on www.banipartide.ro. The report includes various statistics not found in the summary below, including lists of individuals or companies who contributed to the parties’ finances as well as statistics regarding beneficiaries of contracts from political parties.   In order to better understand the Romanian ···

Clientelism without reserves

In October 2021, the indices of clientelism in the allocation of reserve funds to the local administration reached the historical maximum of the last 15 years, according to EFOR calculations. In full pandemic and uncertainty, the government broke the country’s security wallet – the Reserve Fund – distributing for no reasonable reason to municipalities and ···

Participation of third parties to elections

The participation of third parties in political life is not regulated in Romania, the legislation establishing that only candidates and political parties can contribute to electoral campaigns. Third parties are those entities other than electoral competitors that can contribute to the election campaign with the resources to support a candidate or an electoral issue. Third ···

VIDEO Good Roads for Moldova or for vote buying?

What is PNDL in Romania was the program “Good Roads for Moldova” for the government in Chişinău: discretionary purse in anticipation of the general elections of February 2019. In fact, the micro-targeting was even more sophisticated and perverse than parties are able to do in Romania, but the problem of systemic clientelism – discretionary use ···

Georgia map of clientelism

Map of clientelism in Georgia

The clientelism map displays information on transfers made from 2011 to 2016 and coincides with two parliamentary elections 2012 and 2016. The breakdown of transfers is tied to results each party (5 major parties in Georgia) had in majoritarian and party list elections.

The profile of political clientelism in the region: Romania, Moldova and Georgia

Expert Forum and its partners – Watchdog and Expert Grup – have launched a serie of reports on political clientelism in Moldova, Romania and Georgia. Along with the reports we released two interactive maps of political clientelism in Romania and Moldova. The main conclusions Although there are differences in the logic and structure of investment ···

Romania’s Descent Into ‘Fire Sale Government’ Worries Civil Society

A lack of transparency and stable regulations, as well as the constant need to renegotiate how government funds are allocated, has created a fire sale style of politics in Romania and much of the Balkans. This chaotic approach, while healthy for ruling parties and their political clientele, makes real local development impossible and prevents state-owned ···

Why is Romania suddenly in turmoil?

Around the world, tens of millions of people can only dream of an income of $48,000. But in Romania today, that is how much money public officials can steal without fear of prosecution. Strictly speaking, the newly issued government decree does not make theft legal, but it decriminalises government misconduct if less than $48,000 is ···