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The European Commission is alerted that Romania's public debt will reach 100 percent of GDP and confirms that the Citu Government will be obliged to take fiscal consolidation measures - namely austerity, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (PSD) Marcel Ciolacu said on Thursday, according to AGERPRES.
"The European Commission confirms everything we have warned since November 2019: governing on debt that has exploded; zero measures to stop the waste of public money and zero measures to increase revenue collection to the budget. The PNL [National Liberal Party]'s lack of vision has led to the situation where a fortune has been spent as compared to the collected revenues leading to the greatest economic collapse and weakest recovery in the EU. It is confirmed that Romania, unlike the other EU countries, spent the money foolishly without coming up with a serious incentive and recovery plan. The results are catastrophic. (...) The European Commission is alerted that the public debt will reach 100 percent of GDP and confirms that the Citu Government will be forced to take fiscal consolidation measures - austerity measures, that is. That is why they are further postponing the presentation of the budget, somewhere in February, which means that the country will have a budget only in March! Until then, zero investments," Ciolacu wrote on Facebook.
He added that after "breaking record after record in loans in 2020", the Citu Government started the year "with another loan of 1.1 billion lei, at high interest rates".
"Last year, Citu borrowed a total of 34 billion euros per year, over 1,000 euros per second. It is by 80 percent more than the total loans contracted in 2019. It is huge and no one knows what was done with this money: today, we are being told that there isn't any money for salaries, pensions and child allowances, and neither is investment money. However, where is the money? Romania borrows at the highest interest rates in the European Union. The right-wing government borrows from abroad, in the long run, at interest rates 15 times higher than Bulgaria and 19 times higher than Lithuania (...) In the coming years, more than one billion euros will be paid annually to the population and companies through taxes and fees on interest and commissions," the PSD leader affirmed.
