The vice president of the Party “Dignity and Truth Platform” Igor Munteanu said the state has a fragile government liable for budgetary improvisations as the pandemic crisis annihilated all the Government’s financial predictions. The PSRM-PDM coalition banked on economic magic that didn’t work – the dialogue with the EU stagnates, while the sovereign loans promised by some of the states came with delay and got stock owing to the juridical myopia of the leaders of the Party of Socialists. The cumulative effects of the pandemic can generate an economic decline forecast at 10% of the GDP, meaning a loss of revenues of about 25 billion lei in nominal value, trebling of the number of persons out of work, a decline of about US$ 200-300 million in remittances and generic failure to collect about 8 billion lei public revenues, IPN reports, quoting a press release of the PPPDA.
According to the MP, the PDM-PSRM coalition in 2019 voted a budget with a planned deficit of about 10 billion lei, which is 20% of the state budget spending. “The fantastic character of the budget was evident to financial experts, MPs, the press and also to the authors of the draft budget, but the newly-formed political coalition agreed to adopt it as it was drawn up. As a result of an immortal political association, 2020 for both of the components meant an electoral year with an absolute stake. It was anticipated that the gap of 10 billion lei would be covered with foreign loans and grants,” stated Igor Munteanu.
He also said that the Government anticipated that there will be collected about 14.2 billion lei in foreign loans and 1.2 billion lei in grants in 2020. But this was an unrealistic mission then and an impossible mission now. The ACUM Government in 2019 obtained about 1.6 billion lei grants and 400 million lei loans, but it happened amid unprecedented openness on the part of the foreign partners, which treated the government as a preferred and expected partner. Now it is clear that the risky state budget estimates and the incapacity to restore normal dialogue relations with the foreign partners will compromise the stability of the budgetary cycle in 2020.
“Under the most optimistic scenario, the current Government can obtain a maximum of 50% of the planned foreign resources, with discouraging social effects for the public sector employees. The emergency assistance of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the European Union and other partners, the issuing of state securities (4bn) can reduce the financial gap of the budget by about 10 billion lei, but cannot at all deal with the burden of the “electoral” budget (9bn lei), which will remind everyone, including the opposition, of the tribute of the erroneous estimates of the end of 2019. The financial instability will shake the current government of Premier Ion Chicu and will require new urgent political solutions the next 60 days,” said the PPPDA MP.
