Gripped by its most severe bout of political turbulence in decades, Romania has elected a new, highly fragmented Parliament divided between pro-Western centrist parties and anti-establishment nationalists who want to loosen the country’s moorings in the West.
Official results announced on Monday showed the governing Social Democrat Party taking the most votes in a legislative election held on Sunday, slowing the momentum of far-right forces invigorated by their shock victory on Nov. 24 in the opening round of a presidential election.
But the center-left Social Democrats, in and out government for decades, fell far short of a majority, taking just 22.3 percent of the vote; and a strong showing by three hard-right, Russia-friendly parties could make it difficult to form a stable government committed to keeping Romania aligned with the West.
Romania was also bracing for a decision later in the day from its constitutional court on whether to annul the first round of the presidential race, which was won by Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist without a party. On Thursday, the court ordered a recount of presidential ballots after complaints of irregularities by one of the losing candidates.
A decision by the court to cancel Mr. Georgescu’s victory on Nov. 24 would infuriate his supporters and risk street clashes between them and antifascist activists who have been holding daily protests in cities across the country.
In the results of the parliamentary election released on Monday, AUR, a nationalist party led by a firebrand who cast himself as Romania’s Donald J. Trump, finished second with 18.2 percent, nearly double what it won in the last parliamentary election in 2020. Two small far-right groups reached the 5 percent threshold and entered Parliament for the first time. Mr. Georgescu used to be affiliated with AUR but split from it after praising a Romanian fascist leader of the 1930s.
The legislative election on Sunday took place a week after Mr. Georgescu, a previously little-known candidate, won the most votes in the first round of the presidential election and advanced to a runoff to be held on Dec. 8 against Elena Lasconi, a centrist mayor and former journalist. An independent, he had no party competing on Sunday.
That plunged Romania — a member of the European Union and a linchpin of NATO’s defense against Russia and aid for Ukraine on the Black Sea — into political disarray, its most serious since the overthrow and execution of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu 35 years ago.
Ms. Lasconi’s party, Save Romania Union, finished fourth on Sunday with 12.2 percent of the vote, which could augur badly for her chances against Mr. Georgescu, a former soil expert who has spoken of Romanians’ mystical attachment to the land and traditional Christian values.
Mr. Georgescu’s win in the first round of the presidential race stunned Romania’s political establishment and its NATO allies, alarmed by his outspoken hostility to the Western military alliance, his praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and his tributes to Romania’s notoriously antisemitic fascists in the 1930s and early 1940s during World War II.
Urging people to vote on Sunday, the outgoing president, Klaus Iohannis, said Romania faced “an existential decision” that would decide whether the country remained “a country of freedom and openness, or collapse into toxic isolation and a dark past.”
The indecisive results, however, pointed to muddle rather an emphatic rejection of what Mr. Iohannis denounced as “isolationism, extremist mysticism and hatred for Western pluralism.”
The flurry of elections and the uncertainty they generated have raised concerns about Romania’s stability and commitments to the Western alliance, which has an American-built missile defense facility in the south of the country and has been expanding a vital air base in the east.
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