UDMR's Kelemen Hunor: Great irresponsibility for Gov't not to have tabled budget plan

Chairman of the Hungarian Democratic Union of Romania (UDMR) Kelemen Hunor stated on Friday in the Council of Union Representatives (CRU) in Targu Mures that he deems irresponsible the fact that Romania's Government has not yet presented the budget draft, adding that the adoption of Government Emergency Ordinance (OUG) No. 114/2018 was "a bad decision."

He specified that it seems that no extraordinary session of Parliament will be convened this month to debate the budget.

"I think it is a great irresponsibility that the Government has not come up with a budget plan by December 2018 at the latest, nor in October, November, December, as due. I think it conveys a very, very bad message and I hoped that we will have an extraordinary session in January. There might not be one, I think it will be postponed, this extraordinary session has not yet been convened, there is no budget plan devised yet, I do not know what the reasons for that might be and in the meantime, there is a chaos. Why? Because public administrations cannot make any plans, economic enterprises, entrepreneurs, no one in this country can make plans without a budget, everybody is on stand-by, they operate in stand-by and live in stand-by. And if the budget reaches Parliament only in February, then a viable budget will only be outlined at the end of March, early April. This will be the interval in which the country will operate, will function without a budget. This is not good, it's bad, it's unacceptable," Kelemen Hunor affirmed according to the official translation.

The UDMR leader showed that there have been previous situations where, in the electoral year, the outgoing government left a draft budget for the new government to adopt, but 2018 was not an electoral year, which means that the budget blueprint could have been prepared in time and debated.

In addition, Kelemen Hunor said, the Government has also adopted OUG No. 114/2018, which he considers "a bad decision", to which UDMR will try to bring a series of corrections.

"But something else happened, another bad decision was made, for which we criticized and criticize the government. An emergency ordinance that changes the fiscal policy was adopted in the last days of December. A lot of things are changing in a field that does not enjoy sudden moves. It takes half a year for the society to be able to prepare, every segment of society, from public administrations to SMEs, to large multinational companies, to big entrepreneurs, for every economy to prepare for the new rules of the game. At present, this emergency ordinance cannot even be applied and I strongly wonder how the parliamentary debate will take place, it will not be a pleasure walk because it only increases the chaos. The situation must be improved. (...) And if corrections are needed, if a new fiscal policy is needed, then they already need to be prepared in early 2019, so as to have them enter into force in 2020. We have criticized and will continue to criticize this government, this ruling coalition, we will also table proposals for amendment in the event of this emergency ordinance," said Kelemen Hunor. AGERPRES (RO - author: Dorina Matis, editor: Marius Fratila; EN - author: Simona Iacob, editor: Simona Klodnischi)