Florin Manole, Minister of Labour. Inquam Photos / George Calin
The Minister of Labor, Florin Manole, said on Antena 3 on Tuesday that there must be “support for pensioners who have been affected by inflation” and that he will propose “two options” in this regard.
The official said he was still waiting for “some assessments” from the Pensions House.
“Technical solutions exist. We have to check what the capacity of the budget is, because it's a normal thing (…). The deadline for which we had to send proposals is Wednesday, tomorrow, at 1 a.m., and before tomorrow, at 1 a.m., in the draft budget that the Ministry of Labor sees for the year 2026, there will also be a variant related to supporting pensioners,” Florin Manole said.
The proposed variants
The Minister of Labor stated that the first option is “similar to last year's”.
“Last year, the option was two equal installments of 400 lei each, so 800 lei in total, for pensioners under 2,574 lei. It's an option. It's normal to start for this year from what it was last year,” said Manole.
He specified that this mechanism had a budgetary impact of “almost two billion lei”.
“The second variant that I will propose is a variant similar to the one in 2023, in which there were three income thresholds and three different amounts of this support, so that pensioners with lower incomes would have support greater than 800 lei, pensioners with higher incomes, however, below a certain threshold, would have less support,” added the official.
The social democrat explained that in the version with “thresholds” situations are avoided in which a pensioner misses out on support because he receives a pension slightly above the threshold provided by the mechanism.
“I can imagine the legitimate frustration of the pensioner who was 50 lei above the threshold of 2,574 last year. Due to the fact that he has 50 lei in addition to his pension, he misses out on receiving 800 lei. Well, I think we need to have some different thresholds, more than one threshold, but it is a second proposal. Maybe the prime minister, maybe someone else in the coalition has other options – I doubt it, but…”, he also declared the Minister of Labor, Florin Manole.
