Minister of Finances : The discussions regarding the 2026 budget will start towards the end of November

  The discussions regarding the budget for 2026 will start towards the end of November, and the deficit target for next year is 6%, stated on Monday the minister of finances, Alexandru Nazare at a speciality event.   'Today we have four consecutive assessments from rating agencies maintaining our rating, two assessments in European Councils, the first in July, and from all the messages that have been sent and the assessments, both from the agencies and the Commission, we are on the right track," said Alexandru Nazare at the forum "Challenges for financial markets in an economy marked by macro imbalances and fiscal pressures," an event organized by the online publication Profit.ro in partnership with Team Innovation Media.   He added that the next important test for Romania will be the Council of November, where the progress connected to PNRR and the measures for the reduction of the deficit will be analysed.   'Now we have an extremely important Council meeting coming up in November, on November 13, where we have two extremely relevant items on the agenda. The first is the long-awaited formal approval of the renegotiated PNRR, which we need in order to be able to translate all the projects that have been prioritized in the PNRR, and secondly, an initial assessment in the excessive deficit procedure of all the measures, package I, package II, and the whole set of measures we have taken. So, basically, this Council will analyze Romania's financial situation, and I am very confident that this analysis will yield a good, positive result and that this will be reflected in the clarification and resolution of the situation regarding the suspension of European funds, which was another extremely important danger we faced last summer," Nazare added.   The minister of finances also stated that it is expected that after the Council of 13 November the perspective of suspension of funds in 2026 for Romania will be ‘ settled’, perspective which is no longer relevant.   '2026 will be the year of the PNRR. We will have to focus heavily on PNRR absorption. It is true that you cannot recover in one year what has not been done in four, but we must maximize absorption in 2026 as much as possible, and obviously, the more we maximize absorption, the greater our economic growth will be next year," said Alexandru Nazare.   In his opinion, Romania has at least €10 billion in grants that it should accommodate in next year's budget.   'We will begin discussions on the architecture of the 2026 budget after the Council meeting on November 13, and we are relying on these amounts from the PNRR for 2026, which will have to be prioritized given the fiscal space we have available in 2026. I believe that this whole set of measures and this whole process of regaining confidence, both in the direction of the European Commission and in discussions with rating agencies, which have indirectly validated our projection in the budget rectification, this target of 8.4% is by no means a small target, the deficit remains high, but the adjustment we are achieving and the fact that the agencies have somehow confirmed it as plausible puts us in a completely different reality in which we are somehow synchronizing with the agencies' assessments, and this is an important signal of confidence that we are sending," the finance minister added.   According to the quoted source, the budget for next year will be a realistically built one.   When asked whether there were risks of slippage in budget spending in recent months, Nazare said that there were risks, but the ministry was trying to anticipate and mitigate them so that 'we do not end up exceeding the target'. The minister added that 15-20% of annual payments are made in the last two months of the year.   'We have not actually started the consultation process on the 2026 budget. I suspect that we will do so somewhere around the end of November, after we have discussed it with all the line ministries, but we are leaning towards 6% and we announced the two targets in parallel at the time of the rectification, because many of the measures we have taken, which we have measured out for 2026, address 2026 more than 2025. For 2025, we tried through the rectification to cover as much as possible of the outstanding amounts or financing needs for projects, for the PNRR, for the loan part, where you know very well that all the budgets were exhausted in August. We had at least four ministries that had exhausted their budgets for the PNRR loan in August. We could not absorb the money from the PNRR in 2025 if we did not cover those amounts. We are talking about the Moldovan Motorway, the Ministry of the Environment, the Ministry of Development, with the wave of renovations and all the projects at the Ministry of Development that had to be paid for, and I am glad that after the rectification we are able to do this. We have covered these amounts until the end of the year," said Finance Minister Alexandru Nazare.