Candidate Ponta: Next PM, hopefully Tariceanu, takes over budget surplus

Incumbent Prime Minister Victor Ponta, running for president with the support of the alliance made up with his Social Democrat Party (PSD) - National Union for Romania's Progress - Conservative Party, reminds he began governing on a budget deficit of 4.8 percent of the GDP in 2011, and says his successor will start from a budget surplus over the first 10 months of 2014; he hopes the next PM is Calin Popescu-Tariceanu, one of the candidates defeated in the first round of the presidential elections who promised his support to Ponta in the runoff.

Asked whether the government has intensified its generosity during the campaign, and whether he might regret that if he becomes president, because tax increases would be inevitable, Ponta answered Digi TV on Wednesday: 'Of course it's an intensification, but there's something more. It's something else I regret, if I may say so. It's my different situation ; I took over Romania's government [in 2012] with a budget already drafted, with a 2011 deficit of 4.8 percent of the GDP, so with expenditure roughly six billion euros above the revenues, and I will leave it — to Mr. Tariceanu, I hope — on zero for the first time in Romania's history. After 10 months, we have a budget surplus of 400 million lei. We collected more than we spent. Of course I envy my successor, because I know what I inherited, but all I did is the result of sacrifices in the past years. When we kept tightening our belts, when the National Anticorruption Directorate did the right thing helping us, this year it enormously helped us to fight the tax evasion.'

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