MEP Winkler: As EU kickstarts economic recovery program, Romania has twice as high financial resources available

 

Iuliu Winkler said that the EU stands at the beginning of an economic recovery program that will rely both on the 2021 - 2027 EU budget and on the so-called Next Generation EU program - the recovery and resilience program funded from the 700 bln euros the European Union will borrow.

 

"It's the beginning of the road out of the crisis. I think the most urgent task of the government is to impeccably organize the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, then to table the budget on February 4 - and I support this idea of Prime Minister Citu - when the new ministers will have committed to its content. The promise is that this budget will be based on investments and this is the right thing to do because Romania now has the chance of the decade that lies ahead of us," said MEP Winkler.

 

In his opinion, the challenge for the government will be to efficiently manage the funds available to Romania, and he welcomed the economic growth model based on investments promoted by the current Executive.

 

"The money we have access to from various sources: the European budget, the national budget, the resilience and recovery plan, mean in fact resources twice as high in 2021 and 2022 compared to what we have had in the last two years. If resources double, then obviously performance must double too, and this is where the government's biggest challenge resides, in managing much more efficiently a budget that must be investment-oriented, thus replacing the economic growth model applied until now and during the last PSD governments - a model based on consumption as the economic growth driver," Iuliu Winkler said.