Romanian Car Workers Demonstrate for New Highway

Around 8,000 people, most of them union members at the Dacia car factory in Pitesti, took to the streets of the southern town on Monday to protest about the Romanian government's failure to start work on a new highway in the south. 

The project has been discussed for years, but the government postponed it several times due to disagreements over the best route. 

The Dacia employees fear that French group Renault, which is company's majority owner, might decide to close the factory in Pitesti and move the production of the Dacia brand to its other plants in Turkey and Morocco if the highway isn't built.

"The construction of the highway will not only generate new jobs, but will also help us to keep the existing ones at Dacia," said trade union leader Nicolae Pavalescu.

"We don't understand why the government is delaying the construction, as there should be accessed EU funds for this," he added.

The 120-kilometre-long Pitesti-Sibiu highway is planned as part of Pan-European Corridor IV, which goes from the Black Sea port of Constanta to Arad in western Romania.

In April last year, the previous government of former Prime Minister Victor Ponta said it would try to complete the highway by 2020. The cost has been slated at some 1.6 billion euro.

There has been no official reaction to the car workers' demands so far from the current technocratic government of Dacian Ciolos.

Romania currently has around 700 km of completed motorway - not much for a country of its size, and far from the kind of network seen in many countries of Western Europe.

Bucharest has announced plans to build around 725 kilometres of new highways and 1,809 kilometres of express roads over the next 15 years, spending around 28.6 billion euros on the...