The failure of the salary law, officially acknowledged on Wednesday evening by the President of Romania, has turned into a new war between PNL and PSD, with accusations of incompetence, populism, lies, and evasion of responsibility. Ilie Bolojan presents the negotiation figures and claims that the social democrats demanded more and more money, only to ultimately reject the project. Sorin Grindeanu, on the other hand, says that the Government was unable to draft a good law and is now trying to blame others.
The exchange of remarks comes after President Nicușor Dan announced that PSD, PNL, USR, and UDMR failed to reach an agreement and „jointly” assumed the loss of the 770 million euros from the PNRR.
However, Bolojan rejects the idea of shared responsibility and solely points the finger at PSD, accusing the party of irresponsibly and populistically compromising both the chance to receive European funds and the adoption of a law to bring order to the budgetary system.
„The National Liberal Party did everything possible, sought all solutions to reach an agreement on supporting the salary law, but ran into the hypocrisy and evasion of responsibility of PSD,” the PNL leader conveyed in a post on Facebook.
Three amounts in negotiations: 15.5, 8, and 12 billion lei
According to Bolojan, three successive Ministers of Labor from PSD failed to finalize the project started in 2022.
He argues that the former Minister of Labor, Petre-Florin Manole, left behind a project with a salary envelope of 15.5 billion lei, exceeding the level that Romania’s budget could support.
Later, Sorin Grindeanu would have accepted an envelope of 8 billion lei in the negotiations organized by the Presidential Administration. PSD would then have requested an increase to 12 billion lei, but ultimately did not support even this version.
„Why? Out of populism, cowardice, but also out of the desire to maintain a system of privileges for certain public sector employees and union leaders,” Bolojan asserts.
The PNL leader accuses PSD of defending a system where the incomes of some employees remain dependent on the decisions of their superiors, instead of clear rules and uniform salary criteria.
The dispute between the parties was, therefore, twofold: how to allocate the money among different categories of public sector employees and how much the state can afford to spend without worsening the deficit.
The 770 million euros, however, represent something else. They are not funds intended for paying or increasing the salaries of public sector employees, but rather European funds from the PNRR, conditioned on the implementation of the public sector salary reform.
Through this reform, Romania committed to introducing clearer rules for setting salaries and reducing unjustified differences between employees in comparable positions and levels of responsibility.
The parties have pledged to try to adopt the law by the end of the year, respecting the salary envelope agreed upon with the European Commission.