Short answer
No. In the 30 days before the 2016 parliamentary election, the Social Democratic Party (PSD) page drew 7% of the interactions on the three main party pages, against 61% of the three parties' vote. The gap narrowed by 2020 but did not close.
What the evidence shows
- The study uses 36,922 posts from eight Romanian political pages, 2011 to September 2020, comparing engagement on the PSD, PNL and USR party pages with the vote.
- Before the 2016 election the PNL page drew 2.8 times its share of the vote and the USR page 1.6 times.
- The PSD page drew less than its vote share at every election from 2014 to 2020, but the ratio rose from 0.11 in 2016 to 0.70 at the local elections of September 2020.
- While the PSD led the government in 2017 and 2018, a period of large protests, its page drew 4% of the three pages' interactions and USR's 38%.
- Where page sizes are recorded, from 2019, the PSD page had the fewest likes but more interactions per like.
Caveats
The data have no PSD leaders' pages, so this compares party pages with votes, not parties' whole presence on Facebook.