A new study has shown that Romanians are increasingly more tolerant towards LGBTI rights – with 43 percent saying that they support a legal form of same-sex union in Romania, either as civil unions or marriage. That number has doubled since 2016, when a citizens’ initiative to alter the Romanian constitution to explicitly reference marriage as a union between a man and a woman was launched. That citizens’ initiative gathered over three million signatures – substantially more than the 500,000 required to kick start a constitutional amendment referendum. Despite winning a large majority of those turning out to vote, the referendum of 2018 to approve the constitutional change failed, as the turnout was only 21.1 percent, below the required voter-turnout threshold of 30 percent. Had it been approved at the ballot box, the constitutional change would have implicitly prohibited same-sex marriages.