President Sends 2019 Budget Bill Back to Parliament

In a press conference on Wednesday afternoon, the president criticized the ruling Social Democrat Party (PSD) again and requested the Parliament to make a “healthy budget” for Romania.

“I have said and will say it again – the PSD governance has failed. If PSD is not capable of governing for the citizen, it should leave and let others who can do that. Taking all this into account, I will resend the budget bill to the Parliament,” said the president.

Iohannis accused the social-democrats of significantly reducing the budgets of local communities and investments.

“We see how PSD leaders and propaganda obsessively repeats that this budget is one of investments and the main beneficiaries are local communities. But in reality the budget sees a significant reduction in local budgets, a sum of 1.2%. It’s the lowest share they had out of GDP in the past ten years, and sums allotted for investments are RON1 billion smaller when compared to 2018,” the head of state added.

Romania’s Constitutional Court rejected on Wednesday a challenge filed by President Klaus Iohannis against the 2019 state budget, and also approved his separate challenge against the bill which caps certain specialized fiscal-budget indicators for the year.

The state budget challenge was rejected with a majority of the court’s votes, while the budget caps bill notification was admitted unanimously.

Constitutional judges argued that budgets caps bill was passed by erroneous procedure.

Klaus Iohannis challenged the 2019 budget bill on February 22, calling it a „budget of national shame” and criticizing the country’s Government for ignoring issues in health, education and infrastructure.