February 12, 2025
A roundup of domestic and international news
Newsroom, 12.02.2025, 13:55
Ceremony – Romania’s outgoing president, Klaus Iohannis, ended his mandate on Wednesday at noon in a ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Bucharest after impeachment pressure over cancelled presidential vote. He had already announced his resignation on Monday. The two mandates to which Klaus Iohannis was entitled should have ended on December 21 last year, but he remained in office after the Constitutional Court annulled the presidential election due to suspicions regarding interference of state actors. Dissatisfied with the decision of the constitutional court judges, tens of thousands of Romanians protested in the streets. Political analysts believe that, with the resignation of Klaus Iohannis, the tensions in society accumulated in the last months will decrease. A 65-year-old ethnic German, former physics teacher and former mayor of the city of Sibiu (center), Klaus Iohannis leaves the presidency with an extremely low popularity rating. The interim president is, as of Wednesday, the speaker of the Senate, Ilie Bolojan, who previously self-suspended from the position of speaker of the Senate and president of the National Liberal Party (PNL). He will be interim president until May, when the presidential election is scheduled on the 4th and 18th respectively. He will have almost all the prerogatives of the head of state, with a few exceptions: he will not have the right to address Parliament, dissolve Parliament and organize a referendum.
PNRR – The Romanian Prime Minister, Marcel Ciolacu, is today chairing the meeting of the Inter-ministerial Committee for the Coordination of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, which will also be attended by the head of the European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Task Force SG RECOVER, Celine Gauer. The two met on Tuesday, when Prime Minister Ciolacu stated that the Government will continue implementing the reforms and investments assumed through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) at a pace that will be accelerated at the level of each ministry. The PM also emphasized that the digitization measures taken by National Agency for Fiscal Administration (ANAF) improve the collection of public revenues, and the results will be felt in the coming years. At the same time, the reform of the central administration and the other solutions to reduce personnel expenses will lead to a more rigorous control of public resources and to a budget deficit target of 7% of the Gross Domestic Product in 2025, the prime minister added.
Football – The Romanian football champions, FCSB (Bucharest), play, on Thursday, against the Greek champions, PAOK Thessaloniki, a team coached by the Romanian Răzvan Lucescu, in the first leg of the play-off for qualification for the Europa League round of 16. The return match will take place in Bucharest, on February 20. PAOK and FCSB faced each other this season also in the main phase of the competition, and the Romanian champions won the match in Thessaloniki with the score of 1-0. FCSB finished the main stage in 11th place and PAOK in 22nd. The first eight teams qualified directly for the round of 16, and the teams in positions 9-24 will play a double-leg play-off for access to the round of 16.
AI – The European Union will invest 200 billion Euros in artificial intelligence projects – the head of the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, announced in Paris. Attending the international meeting in the French capital dedicated to this sector, the president of the European Commission also spoke about a public-private partnership for mobilizing the capital necessary to develop the new technologies. The Minister of Economy and Digitalization in the Romanian government, Bogdan Ivan, also attended the meeting, and said that Romania was ready to play its role in the projects that will define the future. ‘Romania has a lot of specialists and well-trained companies in the field, and last year it adopted a Strategy for Artificial Intelligence that makes it interoperable from the point of view of research with the most developed states in the world’ minister Ivan also told Radio Romania’s correspondent in Paris.
Corruption – For the third year in a row Romania is among the EU countries with the ‘poorest’ results in combating corruption, obtaining a score of 46 points on a par with Malta, according to the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) for 2024, published by the non-governmental organization Transparency International. Denmark (90 p.) leads the ranking, while on the last places are countries such as Somalia (9 p.), Venezuela (10 p.) and Syria (12 p.). The CPI reflects how independent and business experts perceive corruption in the public sector in 180 states and territories. (LS)
