Bucharest, June 30, 2009 ■ Institute for Public Policy (IPP) will soon launch a complex monitoring report on activities performed by members of the newly elected Romanian Parliament during the first parliamentary session from February to June 2009. Thus we continue our regular release of parliamentary session reports in order to inform the public about their elected officials performance.

The new leadership of the Chambers enthusiastically started the session, but they have not consistently followed the engagements

The two new Presidents of the Chambers have assumed a number of objectives at the beginning of this Parliamentary session aiming to increase transparency and efficiently within the Parliament. The project of the Senate President combines a number of concrete responsibilities derived from his position with several evident electoral objectives without defining priorities. President of the Deputies Chamber joint several important initiatives of the civil society, such as tracking and sanctioning absenteeism or displaying all information related to public expenditures on MPs activity, claiming that these will be her own legislative bills while she had all necessary means to administratively deal with them.

Poiana Braşov, 25 September 2009 ■ The intention to further decentralize public services in strategic domains like education, healthcare or public order, without an objective assessment which should constantly reflect, with statistical data, the local authorities’ effective capacity to take over and manage those functions, is quite risky and may cause serious discontinuities in their being provided to the population. The data concerning several key utilities managed in 2008 by City Halls of Municipalities, such as water and sewerage, household heating, management of green areas, and the community police, point mainly to a tendency to preserve rather than modernize the quality of these services and to a reduced capability to access grant funds for their development. The Ministries’ programs do not rely on systematic assessments of how local services are managed, and are designed more to deal with extreme situations rather than to direct resources towards a strategic modernization of those services. The municipalities’ efforts vary widely from one zone to another and the national policies on public services do not take local features sufficiently into consideration.

Bucharest, June 14, 2009 ■ Taking into account the phenomena during the elections day as well as the worrying absenteeism for European parliamentary elections – Romania being the 24th country out of 27 EU member states in what concerns voters’ turnout – the Institute for Public Policy (IPP) calls Romanian political parties not to abort the responsibility of stimulating debate and deciding in major issues that have generates disputes within this period.

Bucharest, June 4, 2009 ■ The Institute for Public Policy is worried about Romanian parties’ lack of capacity and interest to mobilize citizens to vote in the European elections of June, 7. Although this scrutiny should have been the maturity test for the Romanian political class, the estimated turnout of less than 20% is the proof that our parties are on the verge of failing this test.

Since the first free elections of 2009, Romanians’ interest and trust in the power of changing through voting has constantly degraded: if back in the ‘90s, voters’ turnout was of 86%, in 1992 and 1996 it dropped to 76%, then to 65% in 2000, 58% in 2004, 29% in the first European elections of 2007 and finally in 2008 a little over one third of Romanians still voted for the Parliament. If the voters’ turnout continues to drop down with the same pace, we are wondering what is going to happen in the next elections: will all Romanians quit their right to vote as a protest against the actual political class?

Bucharest, May 28, 2009 ■ The Romanian Permanent Electoral Authority (PEA) finally purchased the soft for countering citizens’ votes in elections for European Parliament of June 7th. The price of 340,000 Euro without VAT was 3 times cheaper that the initial amount publicly announced by the Authority when planning the aquisition. Two weeks ago, learning about this situation, the Institute for Public Policy from Romania called the Romanian authorities to start investigating PEA’s intention to purchase a soft of 1,000,000 Euro although it had an already paid soft costing 700,000 Euro used during the Parliamentaru elections of November 2008. The difference of characteristics between the two softs were minor. IPP also asked for the dismissal of the Vicepresident of the PEA, Mr. Marian Muhulet as he was responsible for such decision. n Muhuleţ.