DistantNews
Support us
🇷🇴 Romania /Elections & Politics

PNL and USR sign parliamentary cooperation deal and call for end to online voting

From Adevărul · () Romanian

Translated from Romanian and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Named sources New plan
  • Romania’s PNL and USR signed a parliamentary cooperation agreement and called for online voting in the Chamber of Deputies to be abolished.
  • The parties said the system, introduced during the pandemic and extended to support recovery-plan legislation, no longer has a justification.
  • Their agreement follows a dispute over the allocation of positions in the Chamber’s Permanent Bureau and demands for transparency from PSD.

PNL and USR have signed a parliamentary cooperation agreement and are pressing to end online voting in Romania’s Chamber of Deputies, calling it a pandemic-era practice with no current justification.

The two parties said they would make their agreement public. PNL also demanded that PSD disclose any protocols it has concluded with extremist parties in Parliament, along with the commitments made in those arrangements. PNL parliamentary group leader Gabriel Andronache called the PNL-USR deal a “general, reformist” agreement and said his party wanted to know what commitments had been made by the PSD-AUR-SOS coalition.

We will make the agreement public, and we emphatically call on PSD to make public the protocol or protocols it has concluded with the extremist parties in Parliament.

· Gabriel AndronacheThe PNL parliamentary leader demanded transparency about PSD’s parliamentary agreements.

PNL lawmaker Raluca Turcan said the joint PNL and USR groups had submitted a formal request to the Chamber’s leadership to abolish online voting. The system was introduced during the pandemic and later extended to help complete projects under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, she said. With the pandemic and the recovery plan now over, Turcan argued, there is no longer any reason to retain it.

It is a general, reformist agreement, and we want to know what the PSD-AUR-SOS toxic coalition has committed to.

· Gabriel AndronacheAndronache described the PNL-USR agreement and criticized PSD’s alleged parliamentary arrangements.

“Parliament is not work from home,” Turcan said. She argued that parliamentary activity in Romania had deteriorated significantly, partly because of online voting. The parties plan to seek changes to committee proceedings as well, including requiring physical attendance and preventing committees from meeting simultaneously so lawmakers can attend debates.

The agreement came a week after PNL and USR left a Chamber of Deputies plenary session in protest at the distribution of positions on the Permanent Bureau. The liberals accused other parties of creating an “under-the-table majority” and violating an agreement reached at the start of the legislature.

Parliament is not work from home.

· Raluca TurcanThe PNL lawmaker argued against continuing online voting and remote parliamentary practices.
About this summary

Originally published by Adevărul in Romanian. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

More Stories

From Our Blog