This is the amount of how many times our colleague Otmar pressed the “refresh” button on the website of the court of appeal on February 19th, 2021 until the decision was finally available.

Yes, the rumors are true: Get the champagne out of the cooler, because...

We think we don't need to say a lot about how happy we are - and we hope you feel the same joy!

As an old Romanian proverb says: Good things happen after 9 months - well, if you consider that our party registration has now taken a whole year, something particularly good must have come out of it!

A log wait

We admit: we weren't 100% sure that it would work out this time. Our first application, submitted at the beginning of the first Corona wave in 2020, was rejected after a long wait. The arguments seemed flimsy to us because we knew that they were wrong: we would not have permission from Volt Europa to use the name and logo, we would be controlled from abroad, we would not be independent, we would not respect the sovereignty of Romania ... Well, we understood the skepticism of the court: they were dealing with something completely new, the first pan-european political movement whose program is not exclusively national but at the same time has a European focus. We are by far not the first national chapter of Volt that is confronted with these hurdles in party registration: our colleagues from Portugal, for example, have been struggling with similar issues.

So we appealed the judgment in the summer of 2020 and tried to explain to the court at the next hearing in fall, that the allegations were incorrect. At this point in time, the court and the public prosecutor's office were still unable to fully understand the nature of Volt, so we submitted another dossier in December 2020 that breaks down our structures and the relationship with our umbrella organization Volt Europa in even more details.

And then we had to wait. First until mid-January, the first date when the decision should have been made. The first time we hit the “refresh” button on the court of appeals’ website hundreds of times all day long until we got the announcement that the decision had been postponed for two weeks.

Well, we had been waiting for a year by now, so two weeks more or less didn't make a huge difference anymore.

Two weeks later, again refreshing the website hundreds of times: the decision was postponed for another week. Ok, now our nerves were a bit tense - this waiting position was pretty exhausting ...

A positive decision

But for us it turned out that the really good things don't take 9 months, but 12! And with the positive decision of the court, we are now the 15th national Volt chapter that is allowed to register as a party! Now all we have to do is wait for the written documents from the court and we can enter our name in the official party register!

We would love to celebrate with you so much - unfortunately we have to wait a little longer for this opportunity due to the pandemic. But we promise: postponed is not canceled! If you are really excited to see who we are: On Friday you have the opportunity to get to know us online in a relaxed manner in our monthly Meet & Greet!

To celebrate this with you and all of Europe, we will soon start a small series in which we will take a closer look at Volt Romania and Volt Europe and how we are working together to make Romania and Europe an even more beautiful place we call home!

Your team from the soon to be (yay!) political party Volt Romania