February 24, 2021

A roundup of domestic and international news

Newsroom, 24.02.2021, 13:55

Budget. The specialized committees of Romania’s parliament will
start debates on the state and social security budgets for 2021 on Thursday
afternoon, during which the parliamentary groups can submit amendments to the draft
drawn up by the Government. The discussions in the committees are expected to
be completed by Saturday, and the vote in plenary on the two documents to take
place next Tuesday. The draft law for approving the ceilings, which must be
adopted before the state budget, will also be debated and voted according to a
tight calendar. The document was endorsed by the Senate and today it will be
voted in the Chamber of Deputies, which is the decision-making body on this
mater. The ceilings bill sets the caps on deficits and staff expenditure. The
document stipulates that the ceiling of the budget deficit will be 7.16% of the
GDP this year, and personnel spending will stand at 9.8%.

Special pensions. President Klaus
Iohannis has promulgated the law by means of which the special pensions of
senators and deputies are eliminated. The law was endorsed by Parliament last
week. All parties, except the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians, which
abstained, voted in favour of the bill initiated by the Social Democratic Party
to eliminate special pensions. The President of the Chamber of Deputies,
Ludovic Orban, has stated that this is just the first step. We will have to fearlessly
attack all the legislation in the field, in order to eventually make sure that
all pensions in Romania are established based on the principle of contribution,
Ludovic Orban said. 800 former
parliamentarians benefit from these special pensions, amounting to some 10
million euros a year, paid from the state budget.

Protests.
Trade union protests continue in
Romania. Today, protests organized by the PUBLISIND Federation, affiliated to
the National Trade Union Bloc, are announced in Bucharest and in the country’s
prefectures against the freezing of salaries and bonuses, the non-indexation of
pensions against inflation, and the lack of a minimum wage increase correlated
with rising prices. PUBLISIND has members from the police, border and
penitentiary police, central and local public administration, social
assistance, court registry, sports and youth, finance and financial or
environmental control. Also today, the Meridian National Trade Union
Confederation and the Federation of Railway Transport Trade Unions in Romania are
protesting in front of the transport ministry headquarters. Meanwhile, the miners who blocked themselves
in the underground of the Lupeni coal mine, in the Jiu Valley (center-west),
ended the protest that had started six days earlier, after they were informed about
the provisions of the agreement, concluded by their leaders and the Ministry of
Labour, under which they will receive all outstanding salaries and other
benefits they are entitled to.

Vaccination.
The vaccination of education
employees, through school inspectorates, has stared today in Bucharest and most
counties in Romania. The whole procedure will take until March 10 for the first
dose of vaccine, and authorities estimate that 60,000 people will be immunized
during this period. So far, more than 42,000 teachers have already been
vaccinated through the specially created national online platform. Meanwhile,
about 80,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine have arrived in the country today,
which will be stored to ensure boosters for those already vaccinated with the
first dose. Since the start of the vaccination campaign in Romania on December
27, a total of almost 2 million doses of vaccine have been received, most of
them from Pfizer. The serum from AstraZeneca has also been administered in
Romania for about ten days now. 3,300 new cases of coronavirus infection have
been reported today, following some 34,000 tests run at national level. Another
73 deaths have also been reported, and 1000 people are in intensive care.

Pandemic. Worldwide, more than 112 million people have been
infected with the new coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, more
than a year ago. About 88 million have been cured, and nearly 2.5 million have
died. The World Health Organization has announced that the death toll has
fallen for three consecutive weeks, and the number of confirmed cases of
coronavirus has also continued to decline. Meanwhile, European countries are
making plans to ease restrictions and resume activities, but are acting
cautiously against the more contagious strains of the new coronavirus. The
European Commission has called on Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary
and Sweden to drop restrictive measures imposed unilaterally at the borders.
The six states have ten days to justify the restrictions. In order to curb the
spread of the new variants, Italy is isolating more and more localities. For
its part, France has for the first time taken the measure of territorial
isolation of the population.

Poseidon 21. Over 700 soldiers, 13 military ships, 9 aircraft, a
pyrotechnic intervention truck and a remote-controlled underwater robot will be
deployed during the ‘Poseidon 21’ exercise organized by the Romanian Naval
Forces between February 26 and March 6. It is the first multinational exercise
in 2021 in the Black Sea. Forces and means from Bulgaria, France, Greece,
Romania, Spain, USA and Turkey will participate. ‘Poseidon 21’, with a high
degree of complexity, is included in the NATO Training Program proposed by Romania
at the NATO Summit in Warsaw, in 2016, to strengthen security measures on the European
south-eastern flank, as well as to ensure a continuous presence in the Black
Sea region.

Moldova. The
Constitutional Court of the Republic of Moldova (ex-Soviet, predominantly
Romanian-speaking), has declared unconstitutional the presidential decree by
which Natalia Gavriliţă has been repeatedly appointed prime minister. The court
requested the resumption of consultations between the President of the
Republic, Maia Sandu, and the parliamentary parties to identify a candidate for
prime minister. Maia Sandu announced on February 11, after consultations with
parliamentary groups, that she proposed, again, Natalia Gavriliţă, already
rejected once, as a candidate for the position of prime minister, practically forcing
the possibility of triggering early legislative elections. (MI)