What the newspapers say: May 20, 2010

Most newspapers on Thursday read about the protest organized on Wednesday downtown Bucharest. Elsewhere in the news, private pensions might sustain the public system’s failure and retrieve only 0.5% of the salary, instead of 2.5%. After 20 years, the Parliament passed the lustration law.

Most newspapers today read about the protest organized on Wednesday downtown Bucharest. Cotidianul quotes an article written by a participant to the protests who describes what he saw. In essence, the protest ended with no major incided.

The only major incident noted by Gandul involved Democrat Liberal Hoara, who, invited by a news television in Piata Victoriei was hit by an egg. Even though escorted, he was sprayed with water, attacked with rocks.

The Social Democrats invited in the studio were cheered by the mob. Dragnea and Banicioiu received a clear message from the mob, that they rest all their chances in their party. Dragnea declared that the people is at its wits end and that the situation is serious.

Elsewhere in the news, Evenimentul Zilei reads that the government hopes to cover a part of the social insurance budget with the future revenues of the young workers. The state plans to take the 2.68 billion lei from the gains of almost 5 million individuals who count on a mandatory private pension.

The newspaper reads that this will be the effect if the state will cut the contributions to the second pillar to 0.5% from June 2010 until next year. In other words, this is read as a masked nationalization of the private pensions.

Currently, contributions are 2.5% of the gross salary, even though it should have reached 3% in 2010 as the law stipulates. Analyst Bogdan Baltazar said that the government’s plan is a crisis measure after all.

On the same topic, Romania libera offers a clear example: the ING Pensions fund made an estimate of the impact of such a case: thus, in current conditions, the state pension on the first pillar would represent in 30 years about 74% of the total sum and the private part, the second pillar, 26%.

If the government cuts for a year the construction to 0.5%, and afterwards it increases it back to 2.5%, then the private pension will be decreased by a third, from 26 points to 18 points. Thus, at each 100 lei, the future individual will lose 8 lei.

Gandul reads that 20 years after the Revolution, Romanian Parliamentarians managed to adopt a lustration law. The Chamber of Deputies voted the normative act initiated five years ago by the Liberals.

There were 203 votes for, 40 against and 12 abstains. If the governing coalition and the Liberals sustained the law, the Social Democrats were split on the matter: most of them were against, arguing that the law is too late. Others approved it, and said that the law admits that in Romania there was a Revolution.

Some of the Social Democrats announced their plans to attack the law at the Constitutional Court as it breaches human rights.