The Liberals announced on Saturday their delegation that will go to the consultations with President Klaus Iohannis scheduled at the Cotroceni Palace for Monday with fair funding of the Army on the agenda. PNL co-president, Vasile Blaga
is the great absent from the Liberals list “The National Liberal Party will be represented in consultations with the President of Romania, Mr. Klaus Iohannis, which will take place at the Cotroceni Palace on Monday, January 12, starting at 10.45, by a delegation formed up the PNL co-president Alina Gorghiu, PNL Vice Presidents Anca Boagiu , Catalin Predoiu and Teodor Atanasiu, and Andrei Chiliman and PNL Secretary General Marian Petrache, “reads a PNL release.
In their turn, the Social Democrats announced that Prime Minister Victor Ponta, Defence Minister Mircea Dusa, and Finance Minister Darius Vâlcov, will be part of the PSD delegation that will go to the consultations with President Klaus Iohannis over increasing the defence budget.
President Klaus Iohannis stated on Tuesday he will call consultations with the parliamentary parties on January 12 with a view to forging an agreement meant to provide 2 percent of gross domestic product to defence starting 2017 and keeping such goal for at least ten years.
‘One of the priorities of my term-in-office for the period immediately ahead is to find solutions for increasing the defence budget. I will call consultations with the parliamentary parties with a view to forging a political agreement meant to provide a minimum 2 percent of GDP to defence. More than that, I propose all the political factors, both in government and in opposition to clearly pledge keeping this minimum goal for at least ten years, so that we might ensure the predictability of military spending particularly with respect to training and the strategic procurement programmes’, Iohannis told a ceremony in which Lieutenant General Nicolae-Ionel Ciuca took up as the new Chief of Staff.
The president told those attending the event at the National Defence Ministry headquarters that he, alongside the other state decision-making factors and the foreign partners will do everything possible to find ‘realistic solutions to assign the budget resources that should allow the fair funding of the military system’.
‘I will not accept in the future that the government, no matter who heads it should not respect the pledged funding for the Army’, the head of state stressed.
