Political disputes on the draft budget
Romania’s state draft budget and social insurances will be subjected to Parliament debates on Wednesday and will be seeing their final voting Thursday
Corina Cristea, 16.03.2026, 13:59
Political disputes concerning Romania’s belated 2026 draft budget are going on until the last moment. On Thursday night, the Executive endorsed the alternative approved after months of talks in the ruling coalition, though the biggest parties in the coalition, PSD and PNL, are still disagreeing on several issues.
“We have proposed a balanced budget, with several challenges – one of the most important being the idea of curbing the budget deficit, which actually is the first major step towards the trajectory Romania assumed 3-4 years ago for reducing the deficit we had in the past years,” the country’s Liberal Prime Minister, Ilie Bolojan, says.
However, the Social-Democrats are pointing out to a series of underfunded social programmes. Dissatisfied with the budget form adopted by the government, where the measures proposed by them in the solidarity package are only partially supported from the state budget, on Sunday night they decided to vote for the budget in Parliament but would not give up the idea of tabling amendments to the social package. There will not be any talks for supporting the amendments tabled, the party president, Sorin Grindeanu says
Sorin Grindeanu: “I don’t want to negotiate the rising of child benefits or the elimination of Health Insurance Contribution for mothers, war veterans, or the clergy. I will appeal to the good will of the MPs, so there will be no political talks.”
The Prime Minister has deemed the PSD move as a populist one, as they don’t mention the resources for the measures proposed.
Ilie Bolojan:“ What all the Romanians must understand? Any proposed expense cannot remain uncovered. Any expense must rely on resources, funds. Someone somewhere loses as money has to come from somewhere. The problem is that we are taking this money from loans and only this year, the interests in this budget stay around 12 billion Euros. Through this game of amendments with a social character, the PSD is coming with an AUR-type rhetoric, trying to somehow avoid the responsibilities of this ruling, which we all share, as it is no easy task to correct deficits.”
At the same time, the PNL has drawn attention to the fact that any attempt at imposing changes through surprise votes in the Legislature could infringe upon the political agreement between the ruling partners and may run the risk of creating a new political crisis. From opposition, the populist AUR party is conditioning the positive vote on the state budget on the acceptance of several proposals – the return to the VAT standard quotas of 19%, the effective lowering of expenditures on various categories, goods and services and a self-censorship concerning expenses from specific external loans.
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