November 4, 2014 UPDATE

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România Internațional, 04.11.2014, 12:05

In Romania, the ruling coalition Tuesday defined its campaign strategy for the presidential runoff. The candidate of the alliance in power, incumbent PM Victor Ponta, said his first choice for a new prime minister is Calin Popescu Tariceanu, currently the Senate Speaker, who won 5.36% of the votes in the first round of the presidential election. Victor Ponta also nominated the deputy National Bank governor Florin Georgescu and the head of the Romanian Intelligence Service George Maior as possible holders of the PM post after the election. The president of the nationalist Greater Romania Party, Corneliu Vadim Tudor, who won 3.68% of the votes, and the independent Teodor Melescanu, a former intelligence chief, with little over 1% of the votes, announced they would back Victor Ponta in the runoff. Ponta’s challenger, the Liberal Klaus Iohannis, said he would not negotiate with his former competitors to secure their support in the second round. In the first ballot, Victor Ponta got 40.44% of the total number of votes, and Klaus Iohannis 30.37%. The turnout was around 53%.

Representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the Central Electoral Bureau Tuesday tried to find solutions to prevent crowding in the polling stations abroad in the second round of the presidential election, due on November the 16th. The Romanian Foreign Minister Titus Corlatean suggested a sworn statement should be available for download on the internet ahead of the vote, and signed in front of the polling station staff, and that the number of stations could be increased. President Traian Basescu said on Monday that the foreign minister and the minister for the Romanian diaspora ought to resign, over what he called serious flaws in the electoral process abroad. PM Victor Ponta replied that Titus Corlatean and his Foreign Ministry team guaranteed that on November 16th all the Romanian citizens who want to vote will be able to do so. In the first election round held on Sunday, Romanian citizens living abroad queued for hours and hundreds of them were unable to cast their votes. Crowding and tensions were reported at the polling stations in London, Munich, Chisinau, Stuttgart, while at the Romanian embassy in Paris the intervention of the French police was required in order to keep the situation from escalating.

On Tuesday the National Bank of Romania lowered the key interest rate by 0.25%, to 2.75% per year. The central bank also decided to reduce the rate of compulsory minimum reserves for foreign currency liabilities from 16 to 14%. On the other hand, the National Bank keeps the compulsory minimum reserves for national currency liabilities at 10%. The National Bank of Romania reduced the monetary policy interest rate in September, from 3.25% to 3% per year, and the compulsory minimum reserves for national currency liabilities from 12% to 10%.

Romania will have a 2.4% economic growth rate in 2015, and 2.8% in 2016, according to the autumn forecast of the European Commission, released in Brussels on Tuesday. The budget deficit will go down this year to 2.1%, and in 2015 it might rise to 2.8%, with a new decrease expected in 2016, according to the EC. Forecasts also point to a slight increase in inflation in the coming two years, after a substantial drop in 2014. the unemployment rate is also slightly lower than last year, and expected to keep its downward trend in the coming few years. As for the Eurozone, the EC expects a 0.8% growth this year and a 1.1% growth rate in 2015. The Eurozone will also see a 0.5% inflation rate this year and 0.8% in 2015, as the zone’s economies are slowly recovering from the crisis.