Romania’s pro-European government has collapsed after losing a confidence vote, unleashing renewed political turmoil less than a year after the ruling coalition was sworn in and with the far right surging in the polls.

“This censure motion is false, cynical and artificial,” the liberal prime minister, Ilie Bolojan, told parliamentarians before the vote on Tuesday. “Any country in a multitude of crises would try to consolidate governments, not to change them.”

The motion, tabled by the Social Democrats (PSD), the largest party in parliament, and the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), won 281 votes in the 464-seat parliament. Bolojan’s PNL party and its USR allies did not vote.

The AUR’s leader, George Simion, called for early elections, saying the “voice of the people” had been heard and his party assumed responsibility for “the future of the country”. Romania’s destiny “must be decided by the votes of Romanians”, he said.

But elections are not due until 2028 and a snap ballot is considered unlikely, mainly because the AUR has surged past the PSD as the most popular party in the polls since last year’s parliamentary vote and now enjoys about 37% support.

The centrist president, Nicuşor Dan, who must nominate a new prime minister, is instead expected to invite parties for negotiations to try to rebuild the four-party coalition, either under a different PNL premier or possibly a technocrat.

Dan said on Tuesday it was “not a happy moment”, but ruled out early elections. Excluding the possibility of the far-right entering the coalition, he said the country would have a new pro-western government within a “reasonable amount of time”.

The centre-left PSD has often said it would rejoin a pro-EU coalition under a new prime minister. “There is life after the no-confidence vote,” the party’s leader, Sorin Grindeanu, told reporters. “We want to keep broadly this coalition.”

Bolojan’s party, however, appeared divided, with some senior figures ruling out working with the PSD again and others pushing for reconciliation. “We must keep our options open,” the PNL deputy prime minister, Cătălin Predoiu, said after the vote.

A third coalition member, the reformist Save Romania Union (USR), has said it was unwilling to return to government with the Social Democrats, saying it was not afraid of an early election and was open to forming a minority government.

The embattled prime minister had led a minority government since late last month, when the PSD called for him to go and walked out of the four-party coalition, before allying with the opposition AUR to file the no-confidence motion.

The centre-left party had clashed repeatedly with Bolojan as his unpopular austerity measures – including tax increases, public sector wage and pension freezes, and cuts to public spending and public sector jobs – hit its voters and its popular support.

When the coalition was sworn in last June, it promised to make reducing Romania’s budget deficits – one of the EU’s highest – a top priority. Its cuts have helped reduce the deficit from 9.3% to 7.9%, but at significant political cost.

The country must continue to shrink its deficit, which was forecast to narrow to 6.2% this year, and implement further reforms, to secure about €10bn in EU recovery and resilience funds before an August cutoff.

Bolojan said on Tuesday the no-confidence vote did “not take into account the context in which we find ourselves”. He knew he would not “receive applause from citizens, but I chose to do what was urgent and necessary for our country”, he said.

Last year, Bolojan’s PNL, the PSD and two other pro-EU parties formed a coalition after parliamentary elections in which the AUR won a third of seats, ending months of political turmoil that began with the annulment of presidential elections in late 2024.

The far right’s Simion won the first round of the re-run presidential ballot, collapsing the previous PSD-PNL coalition government, before being convincingly beaten by Dan in a high-stakes second round last May.

Cristian Andrei, a Bucharest-based analyst, said it could take weeks for the president to find a majority and name a prime minister, with a new government looking “difficult to achieve”.