The head of the left wing PSD, Liviu Dragnea, says that the new pension law will not be enforced starting 2018 as it hasn’t been approved yet, which also means it will not be part of next year’s budget.
Dragnea didn’t provide any reasons for the delay, but said that “the pension law mustn’t have a financial impact in 2018, but all the increases that we mentioned in the governing program will be included in the budget draft bill”.
According to the initial plans of the center left coalition PSD-ALDE, the pension point should have been hiked from RON 1,100 in July 2017 to RON 1,100 as of July 2018, with further increases down the road up to RON 1,775 by October 2020. Also, the minimum pension should have been increased to RON 650 starting January 2018.
In September, the minister of labor Lia Olguta Vasilescu said the new pension law was needed to solve the “chaos” recorded in the system. She suggested that all pensions would have to be recalculated.