Kelemen Hunor: Budget, parliamentary session, Justice laws, application of reforms - discussed with President Iohannis

The state budget for this year, the priorities of the new parliamentary session, the abolition of the Special Section and the laws of Justice, as well as the implementation of reforms were on the agenda of the talks held on Tuesday between President Klaus Iohannis and the ruling coalition leaders," Deputy Prime Minister Kelemen Hunor, leader of the Hungarian Democratic Union (UDMR), told AGERPRES.

The budget deficit cannot exceed 7.1%, the UDMR leader said.

"We talked about the budget, we talked about the parliamentary agenda. Next week the Parliament convenes and it was natural to have a discussion about the agenda of the first session, especially since there are some urgencies. The first urgency is the budget and we discussed the possibility of meeting a deficit of 7% or 7% and a little. It cannot exceed 7.1%, this is clear, because at this moment we have to go down from 10% to 7% in 2021", the deputy prime minister said.

According to him, the discussions also focused on legislative priorities related to the laws of Justice. "We approved in the Government last week a memorandum in which we said that, until the end of February, the Ministry of Justice will come with a bill (...) which aims to abolish the Special Section and until April it will come with the other bills related to Justice laws. We said that this year we must make every effort to get rid of Cooperation and Verification Mechanism, because another mechanism for verifying the rule of law is taking effect and Romania must not be left with the two verification mechanisms," Kelemen Hunor explained.

Another topic addressed was the correlation of reforms with the National Recovery and Resilience Program.

He described the talks with President Klaus Iohannis as "constructive".

"Everyone agrees that we need to find a budget balance, to have investments, to have economic development, but we cannot exceed 7.1% and we have to put the figures back inside the budget, not by overcoming the deficit," Kelemen Hunor said.