The Senate and the Lower Chamber met yesterday in the first ordinary session this year, the order of the day including the election of the leadership of the two Chambers. This however was a formality, USL having announced that it will maintain Valeriu Zgonea and Crin Antonescu at the helm of the Lower Chamber and the Senate respectively. In what concerns the new session’s legislative priorities, adopting the draft budget law and the draft social insurance budget law for 2013 were the priorities. The Lower Chamber’s Permanent Bureau decided that the MPs will work on the draft budget today and tomorrow, in a joint meeting, until 8 PM. The announcement was made by Lower Chamber secretary Niculae Mircovici. PDL representatives announced that they will vote against the draft budget presented by USL. “PDL will vote against the budget presented by USL because it is a budget that deceives the Romanians’ expectations. (…) We believe that this budget is a budget whose main characteristic will be unemployment,” PDL First Vice President Cezar Preda stated yesterday at the end of the party’s Permanent National Bureau (BPN) meeting. The Parliament’s budget-finances commissions adopted on Friday evening, with amendments, the draft budget law for 2013. The report was adopted with 23 votes in favour, 3 abstentions and 5 votes against. We remind our readers that opposition MPs filed 10,000 amendments to the draft law.
