The Government returns to work today, after a two-week holiday. The current Cabinet has entered its final and most important year of the term won after the elections in 2000. On the one hand, it set out to win the elections on all categories, while on the other, it plans to conclude accession negotiations with the European Union. Many careers are hanging by this year's results.
Only a month before the legislative and presidential elections, that is mid November, the country report issued by the European Commission will show whether Romania is a functioning market economy or not, which grade is needed by the Administration in Bucharest if the EU accession in 2007 is to be something more than an illusion. The ruling party and PSD (Social Democrat Party)'s minority Government have to please an European supervisor whose patience is running thin and the Romanian voters who are hardly picky when it comes to handouts for electoral purposes. The conclusion of the accession negotiations this year entails enacting reform measures, which will surely not be to everybody's liking, and that might translate in an electoral cost impossible to overlook. When at the end of 2002 Adrian Nastase was suggesting early elections, the motivation behind this was a generous one: 2004 was a crucial year integration-wise, therefore we needed a stable government instead of the election frenzy that largely cancels bold initiatives out. When making a series of reform promises before the European Commission prior to the publication of the country report for 2003, Adrian Nastase had a reason for this: getting the functioning market economy grade for Romania would have made the Government look better to voters and relieved some of the tension in the relations with EU. That the grade was not granted shows the EU no longer believes in promises, although it makes a lot of promises itself. In 2003, Romania was promised by the heads of state and governments in the EU that it would join the EU in January 2007 if ready for it. The fact that 2004 is an electoral year was one of the factors considered in European Commissions' analyses, which is twisting the Romanian Government's arm to do in one year all those things it was unable to accomplish in three.
Since 2000 when the accession negotiations started, Romania has provisionally closed 22 chapters out of 30. The most difficult chapters are left for debate now. It is about agriculture, environment, industrial policies, justice and internal affairs or the competition - precisely those fields yet unreformed. The final closing of the chapters entails completion of the goals and only then can an accession treaty be concluded to pave the way to the Union.
iulian.anghel@zf.ro
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