UPDATE 1 - Romanian Social Democrats Maintain Narrow Lead over Democratic-Liberal Party after Sunday General Election

PSD has won 33.09% of the votes cast for members of the lower chamber and 34.12% of the votes for the Senate. PD-L was a close second with 32.34% backing for the Chamber of Deputies and 33.57% support for the upper chamber, the Central Electoral Bureau, BEC, said.

Earlier on Monday, the Democratic-Liberal party was leading in the race for both houses of Romania's parliament with a thin margin ahead of the Social Democrats, which ran on a joint ticket with the relatively small Conservative Party. Later in the day, as vote counting progressed, PSD emerged as winner in the neck-to-neck race with PD-L.

Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu's National Liberal Party, PNL, is trailing far behind the two frontrunners, winning 18.57% of the votes for the Chamber of Deputies and 18.75% of the votes for the Senate, according to the latest partial results. Nevertheless, PNL is expected to play a crucial role in the post-election negotiations for forming the next coalition government.

The Democratic Union of the Hungarians in Romania (UDMR) ranked fourth with 6.18% of the votes for the 315-seat lower house and 6.41% of the votes for the 137-seat Senate.

The Nationalistic PRM party and the New Generation Party-Cristian Democrats (PNG-CD), led by controversial businessman George Becali, have won more than 2.0% of the votes each for both the lower house and the Senate, but remain below the 5.0% threshold required to enter parliament. BEC is expected to release the final results later this week.

Voter turnout was 38.94% on Sunday, according to the latest BEC data. More than 18.3 million are the eligible voters in the country of 21.5 million people.