The pension law is again submitted to the romanian parliament

The Romanian President on Thursday called on the presidents of the two chambers of Parliament to agree to the pension law being looked into again.

He remarked that the retirement age of 65 years both for men and women was not in keeping with the socio-economic realities in this country and proposed that women retire at 63.

The president’s decision took everybody by surprise since the law had just been declared constitutional by the Constitutional Court, where it had been challenged by the social-democrat and liberal opposition.

Five of the nine judges of the Court believed that the opposition’s notifications were not valid and thus allowed the law to be forwarded to the president for promulgation.

The Court’s ruling had triggered discontent among the opposition and the pensioners, but representatives of the power claimed that the new law did justice in the public pension system since it observed the contribution principle and did away with huge discrepancies.

In addition to establishing the same retirement age for men and women, the law provides for the elimination of special pensions for policemen, the military and magistrates and for the freeze of pensions in 2011.

The liberals had claimed that the law violated the non-retroactivity principle, the right to ownership and the right to a decent life.

In turn, the social-democrats had called forth what they called “the fraud in Parliament”, saying that there was no quorum in the Chamber of Deputies at the voting time, as shown by the local monitoring camera footage, a fact disregarded by the chamber’s president, liberal-democrat Roberta Anastase.

The leader of the Social-Democratic Party, Victor Ponta had even threatened that if the president promulgated the law, his party would enact the procedure of his impeachment.

The unions had also called on the president not to promulgate the law being dissatisfied with the way the reference pension point is calculated and with the elimination of certain facilities for people with hard working conditions.

The president’s refusal to promulgate the law in its present variant has left the opposition without any argument.

The impeachment procedure has no more object and the law has been submitted again to Parliament, where a new vote is very likely to be won even with a narrow margin by the ruling coalition made up of the Liberal-Democratic Party, the Democratic Union of Ethnic Hungarians in Romania, the group of non-attached MPs and the group of minorities other than the Hungarian one.

We recall that the reform of the pension law was a pledge made by Romania and laid down in the stand-by accord on a 20 billion euro loan concluded with the IMF, the EU and the World Bank.