FES BRIEFING ROMANIA Trade Union Monitor April 2021 POLITICAL, ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL FRAMEWORK POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT 2020 was an electoral year, with two rounds of elections tak­ing place during the year – local elections were organised on 25 September and general elections on 5 December. Initially scheduled for June 2020, the emergence of the ­COVID-19 pandemic led the Government of Romania to post­pone local elections to a date no later than 31 December 2020. Using the first past the post system, the elections for mayors resulted in 34.58 per cent votes for the National Lib­eral Party(PNL), 30.34 per cent for the Social-Democratic-­Party(PSD), 6.58 per cent for the Alliance USR-Plus and a sim­ilar distribution for local council votes(PNL 32.88 per cent, PSD 28.40 per cent, USR-Plus 6.85 per cent) and for county councils(PNL 30.76 per cent, PSD 22.32 per cent, USR-Plus 6.65 per cent). Other smaller parties, like the People's Move­ment Party(PMP) or the Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania(UDMR) have barely passed the electoral threshold (5 per cent). cross-party consensus, especially in the first months of the pandemic and during the state of emergency: an indemnity for so-called technical employment, a compensation and days off for parents caring for their children during temporary closure of schools, etc. The electoral campaign has intensified competition between the right-wing government led by Prime Minister Ludovic Or­ban(PNL) and the left-wing PSD, which holds most seats in Parliament, and ended the cross-party consensus prevailing in the first months of the pandemic. Taking advantage of their majority inside the Romanian Parliament, the PSD initiat­ed and adopted several bills with significant social impact, whose implementation would result in an increase in Govern­ment expenditures and put additional pressure on the state budget, already heavily burdened by the COVID-19 crisis. Amid the electoral battle, on 22 September 2020, five days ahead of the local elections, a bill that forces an immediate 40 per cent hike in statutory pensions, supersiding a milder 14 per cent increase proposed by the Government was adopt­ed by the Romanian Parliament. The law did not enter into force since it was challenged by the Government before the Constitutional Court. The general elections, held on 5 December, inverted the re­sults of the local ones – the PSD won most of the votes(28,90 per cent), followed by the PNL(25,19 per cent) and the Alli­ance USR-PLUS(15,37). The biggest surprise was the perfor­mance of the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians(AUR), a right-wing populist party created only a few months before the local elections, which got 9 per cent of the votes, posi­tioning itself as the fourth biggest parliamentarian party, fol­lowed by the Romania Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania(UDMR, 5,74 per cent). Following the elections, a new center-right government coalition, formed by PNL, Alli­ance USR-PLUS and UDMR and led by prime minister Florin Citu was formed. The main political debates of the year revolved around the measures undertaken by the Government in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Several measures found approval in a In October, the Parliament voted a bill that would result in a gradual doubling of social benefits over the next three years (2021–2023). After being challenged by the PNL before the Constitutional Court, which ruled that the bill is constitution­al, the law was sent back to Parliament for revision by Presi­dent Klaus Iohannis. The the Living Wage Act, which provides that a living wage shall be the main criteria in setting the national minimum wage was voted for by Parliament in June 2020. The law was opposed by PNL, who challenged it before the Constitution­al Court, which again ruled the bill to be constitutional. The law entered into force in August 2020. Calculations show that the living wage for one person would be 2,818 RON in 2020(575 Euro), double the net minimum wage of 1,346 RON(275 Euro). Although the law entered into force, the Government did not consider it when setting the minimum 1