The Week in Review 22-28.05.2017

A look at the main stories in Romania this week.

Roxana Vasile, 27.05.2017, 14:00

Romania at the NATO summit

Romania has reached its goals at the summit, President Klaus
Iohannis said Thursday, fresh from a NATO meeting hosted by Brussels:

I am convinced that this meeting has contributed to ensuring
a solid defense for Romania and a visible role for this country in guaranteeing
the security of our region and of the Euro-Atlantic area.

President Iohannis pointed out that Romania wanted a strong,
united and cohesive Alliance, a strong trans-Atlantic relation and a
well-consolidated and balanced eastern flank:

I am happy to see that the idea has been generally accepted
and member states are working on a concept that will lead to a balanced
approach on the eastern flank. It is critical for us that the Black Sea and the
Black Sea region should remain the focus of attention, and if we speak about
the eastern flank, we should obviously also speak about Russia. Things are very
clear in this respect: we want to have a unitary approach, not against Russia,
not for Russia, but a unitary approach when it comes to Russia.

At the NATO summit the Romanian President also emphasized the
fact that Romania’s having earmarked 2% of its GDP to defense was much
appreciated by the Allies. They agreed that NATO should be more active in
fighting terrorism and become a member of the Global Coalition Against Daesh,
without, however, getting involved in the combat operations. Last but not
least, President Iohannis hailed the completion of Montenegro’s NATO accession.
On the sidelines of the summit in Brussels, Klaus Iohannis had a meeting with
his Polish counterpart Andrzej Duda, with whom he discussed about staging a new
regional meeting in Bucharest, in preparation for the NATO summit of 2018.
Since Thursday’s NATO summit was the first to be attended by two new leaders,
the US President
Donald Trump and the French President Emmanuel Macron, President Iohannis
warmly welcomed them, assuring them of Romania’s entire support, since Romania
has solid strategic partnerships with both countries.

The European Commission and the IMF on Romania’s economy

The European Commission (EC) has this week warned Romania
that in 2016 it significantly swerved from the medium-term budget targets, and
that this year it also risks further deviation from the targets. The EC expects
Romania to report a budget deficit of 3.5% of the GDP in 2017 and of 3.7% in
2018, above the level agreed upon with the EU by 3%.

Brussels officials are concerned, among other things, with
the implementation of the unitary pay law for public sector employees,
currently debated by Parliament, which might lead to much higher expenses than
the coalition government in Bucharest can afford. Consequently the EC
recommends Romania to use any supplementary revenues to reduce the deficit and
to also take measures for a more efficient tax collection and for fighting
illegal labor. The same pay law is in the focus of the IMF, which sees the law
alongside the new tax cuts as risks posed to the budget deficit, which was estimated
at 3.7% in 2017. According to the IMF, Romania’s economy will report 4.2%
growth in 2017.

The unified pay law reaches Parliament

The main party in the governing coalition, the Social
Democratic Party, claims the salaries of Romanians need to be augmented, to
prevent them from leaving the country, a move that would entail higher
budgetary expenses. Starting from this idea, the Government has sent to
Parliament for debate the unified pay bill for public sector employees, which
was already passed by the Senate on Tuesday. Next week the bill will be debated
by the Chamber of Deputies’ experts’ committees, which is a decision-making
body in this regard. The bill provides for major salary increases for public
sector employees, in several stages, by 2022.

The draft law was voted by the senators of the Social
Democratic Party and of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats as well as of
the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, but it was criticized by
the opposition parties, the National Liberal Party, the Save Romania Union and
the People’s Movement Party. Their reason for rejecting the bill was that it
does not clearly stipulate the impact on the budget and the source of funding
salary rises. More than 300 amendments were made to the bill, of which more
than half were adopted, some of which were made by the opposition. In another
development, also on Tuesday, President Iohannis promulgated the law that
increases the salaries of military staff, a law that benefits over 46,000
people.

Investigation into the 2009 presidential elections

A special parliamentary committee is investigating the
circumstances in which, back in 2009, the former right-wing president, Traian
Băsescu, obtained a second term in office as president, defeating in the second
round the then Social Democrat leader Mircea Geoană. The investigation was
generated by the controversial journalist Dan Andronic whose disclosures in the
press led to the setting up of the committee. Heard by the committee on Monday
Dan Andronic said he had no further information on the issue, besides what he
had already revealed, or any indication that the election was possibly rigged.

Recently he has stated that on the night preceding the second
round of the presidential vote, 8 years ago, he met, in an informal place, with
the then prosecutor general Laura Codruţa Kovesi, currently the head of the
National Anti-Corruption Directorate, the former director of the Romanian
Intelligence Service, George Maior, currently Romania’s ambassador to the
Washington, and his first deputy, Florian Coldea, and that the meeting seemed
to be a crisis cell. According to Andronic, all the aforementioned officials
risked being dismissed if Mircea Geoană became president. Before the
investigation committee Mircea Geoană said there was a deliberate effort,
coordinated from the state’s highest level, to influence the election.

The special parliamentary committee will continue the
hearings of high-raking politicians and diplomats who were involved in the 2009
election.