Durata mandatului aleșilor locali și principiul periodicității alegerilor
The term of office of local elected representatives and the principle of election periodicity

Summary/Abstract: The principle of the periodicity of elections implies that they must be held continuously, at regular time intervals, without mergers affecting the duration of the mandates in progress or the exercise of the right to vote. It is considered part of the European electoral heritage, alongside universal, equal, freely expressed, secret, and direct suffrage. Despite its capital importance for democracy, this principle is most often altered by collusion of elections or erroneous interpretations of the notion of the duration of the mandate. The absence of an Electoral Code, which would ensure a single regulatory framework for all types of elections, encourages the legislator, primary or secondary, to adopt derogatory rules that are often incompatible with the constitutional requirements or with the stability that must characterize the regulations in the electoral field. The jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court on the question of the free and periodic nature of elections is constant, and the doctrine includes solid analyses regarding the free, periodic, and fair nature of elections and the legal security that must characterize electoral law. The electoral regulations specific to the year 2024 contain several derogatory norms that reopened the issue of periodicity of elections for local public administration authorities, both at the level of jurisprudence and at the level of doctrinal debates.

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