Romania takes EU helm amid tensions with Brussels

BUCHAREST: Romania will take over the EU’s rotating presidency on Jan 1 at a tumultuous time for the bloc, which is at loggerheads with the increasingly populist government in Bucharest on multiple fronts.

Several crucial events will take place during Romania’s first six-month tenure in the presidency, including Brexit, EU parliamentary elections in which eurosceptics will vie for increased influence and wrangling over the next budget.

Ongoing tensions between Romania, one of the EU’s most consistently europhile countries since it joined in 2007, and Brussels may complicate things further.

Romania’s leftwing government has recently begun to adopt the sort of nationalist rhetoric expounded by nearby Hungary and Poland.

All three countries are embroiled in disputes with the EU over controversial reforms that critics say undermine the rule of law.

Liviu Dragnea, head of the ruling Social Democrats (PSD) and widely seen as Romania’s most powerful man, has slammed the EU as “unfair”, claiming Brussels is seek- ing to deny Bucharest the “right to hold its own opinions”.

One of the main reasons for the cooling of relations between Bucharest and Brussels is the PSD’s planned overhaul of Romania’s judiciary, which the government says is aimed at clamping down on “abuses” by judges and magistrates.

But the European Commission has called for the reforms to be scrapped, saying they undermine the fight against corruption in one of the EU’s most graft-prone states.

European officials “have the feeling, perhaps justifiably, that these reforms are for the benefit of Dragnea”, said political scientist Andrei Taranu.

The government has proposed a criminal amnesty for politicians including Dragnea, who was given a suspended jail sentence for electoral fraud in 2016 and is being investigated in two other criminal cases.

In this context, Dragnea’s switch to a more populist or even nationalist tone could be more opportunistic rather than ideological, Taranu argued.