ISSN: 2560-1601 Vol. 36, No. 1 (RO) January 2021 Romania political briefing: Outlook for 2020: a coalition Government who has to deal with the pandemics Oana Cristina Popovici 1052 Budapest Petőfi Sándor utca 11. +36 1 5858 690 Kiadó: Kína-KKE Intézet Nonprofit Kft.
[email protected] Szerkesztésért felelős személy: CHen Xin Kiadásért felelős személy: Huang Ping china-cee.eu 2017/01 Outlook for 2020: a coalition Government who has to deal with the pandemics 2021 started with a new liberal Government, representing a coalition formed by three parties which managed to impose the majority in the new Parliament, elected in December 2020. The probability of populist measures, meant to further affect the budget deficit, is reduced, but the Government has to deal with several major problems this year: first of all, the adoption of the state budget; secondly, the relaunch of the economy while continuing to handle the COVID-19 pandemics and the vaccination campaign and finally, drawing the Resilience and Recovery Plan for absorbing the European Union’s funds. The end of 2020 in Romania was marked out by the elections for the National Parliament, whose results were meant to shape the new political environment. The results were in the favour of the Social Democrat Party, which gathered almost 29% of the total number of votes, followed by the National Liberal Party (NLP) with over 25% and the Union Save Romania (USR) and PLUS alliance, with over 15%. The results were not the expected ones for NLP, which was the main favourite to win the election, according to the opinion pools.