On Thursday, the European Parliament will vote on a European regulation on the RepowerEU chapters of national recovery and resilience plans. We ask MEPs to make sure with their vote that RepowerEU, the energy crisis and the war in Ukraine will not be used by member states as an excuse to abandon the reforms promised in the national recovery and resilience plans..

We are asking Romanian MEPsespecially from the S&D (PSD) – the rapporteur Dan Nika, Victor Negrescu, Carmen Avram, who proposed and supported in the specialized committees of the European Parliament the amendments to weaken the reforms, and also from the EPP (PNL), the rapporteur Siegfried Muresan, who abstained from voting, not to show once again that Romania is a problem state in the EU. We risk once again, on the eve of the decision on accession to Schengen, to prove that Romania is represented by anti-reformists, this time going so far as to endanger the reforms in all member states, not only here. Of course, no one in Europe – from the European Commission, from the European Parliament, from the governments of the member states – will forget who proposed to weaken the reformsuntil 2026, when the Recovery and Resilience Funding Program ends.

The text adopted by the specialized committees of the European Parliament, which will be discussed tomorrow, contains a problematic amendment put forward by the Romanian PSD MEPs, which reads as follows: if national recovery and resilience programs have measures that are generally affected by the current context, they will be open to revision without indicating any restrictions on such revisions. The big bet is that “measures” mean not only investments, but also reforms. And these are not only reforms proposed in RepowerEU, as some Romanian MEPs have publicly claimed, but also reforms in the rest of the PNRR, if you can find a reason somehow related to the crisis in Ukraine or a contradiction with RepowerEU. Even if the reform proposal may be rejected by the Commission, there will be endless pressure on the Commission and, as a result, significant delays in reform and investment in almost any national recovery and resilience plan.

In other words, for example, if a member state starts to complain that the pension reform is against RepowerEU’s goal of providing consumers with affordable energy, it can start an endless debate with the European Commission that the pension reform should be postponed. If a member state wants to postpone the reform of state-owned companies on the pretext that now, with the energy crisis, is not the time to appoint competent and responsible people to run energy companies, it can again put pressure on the European Commission to act. And here this applies not only to Romania, but also to any member state that promised reforms and now wants to stop honoring what it promised. In general, the reforms proposed in the National Recovery and Resilience Agendas include complex governance reforms that have just been initiated by states on the condition of European money, otherwise he would not have taken it. If the text remains as it is, without clarifications that leave no room for interpretation, the European Commission will be overwhelmed by the re-opening of reform discussions in every Member State that does not want to reform; Absolutely any measure of good governance, especially unwanted by troubled states, can be used as a reason for revision on more dubious grounds. Without clear limits on resuming the reform debate, Pandora’s box opens which may affect the implementation of national reform and sustainability plans, including other reforms in the plans and including absorption of money.

We call on MEPs from all political groups to reject the current text and secure the final text define clear boundaries for the possibility of reviewing the reforms, as provided by the European Commission in the original textso that anti-reformers here or elsewhere in the EU have no chance to break their promises and derail the use of recovery and resilience funding.

Open letter of the Forum of Experts, published in Romanian and English.

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