Ioan-Victor Popa
November 2025: Romania’s presidential and legislative elections sent a shockwave through Europe. The far right’s strong showing in the parliamentary vote, combined with the first-round success of a little-known candidate with fringe views in the presidential race - a result ultimately annulled by Romania’s Constitutional Court - marked a sharp and sudden break with a political landscape long defined by stability. The status quo built on the alliance between the Social Democratic Party (PSD) and the National Liberal Party (PNL) absorbed an unexpected blow, made all the more striking by the fact that the Social Democratic candidate, Marcel Ciolacu, failed to make it to the second round - an unprecedented outcome in the party’s history. Parliament emerged considerably fragmented, forcing the former PSD–PNL alliance to seek new coalition partners.
At that juncture, one of the Social Democratic leaders, Sorin Grindeanu - currently party chairman - made explicit reference to Bulgaria as a cautionary tale: forming a new governing coalition was meant to spare Romania from the “Bulgarian scenario,” in which governmental and political instability had produced a proliferation of legislative elections. Indeed, Romania’s southern neighbour had been mired in severe political volatility for several years, with successive parliamentary dissolutions. It was only in April 2026 that a clear majority finally emerged, following an eighth round of legislative elections.Romania’s comparative advantage was therefore to be preserved.
The comparison with Bulgaria, though uncommon in Romanian political discourse, has a certain natural logic: both countries emerged from the communist bloc in 1989, joined the European Union simultaneously in the fifth enlargement wave of 2007, and have followed nearly identical paths of integration. They acceded to the Schengen Area in two stages, in 2024 and 2025. When the Bulgarian comparison was invoked in Romania, it tended to flatter the country of Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran over that of Hristo Botev.
This rhetoric has, however, undergone a significant reversal since Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro at the start of 2026: Romania has found itself, in a sense, behind on one of the most consequential chapters of European integration, when measured against a neighbour with a broadly similar European trajectory - one that Romania had long regarded as being in a far more precarious position than itself.
A Rift between Public Opinion and Institutions
The contrast between the two countries reveals much about Romania’s priorities and institutional culture, both in the financial sphere and in relation to European integration. Romanian authorities tend to frame euro adoption primarily as the eventual outcome of a cost-benefit analysis rather than as a matter of principle tied to European integration - a framework explicitly proposed in a 2012 report by the National Bank of Romania (NBR). As for public opinion, Eurobarometer surveys consistently record genuine enthusiasm among Romanians for adopting the euro, though this support has shown some decline in recent years. Notably, the most recent 2025 Eurobarometer reveals that the share of Romanians in favour of the common currency is considerably higher than among Bulgarians (71% versus just 45%, against a European average of 55%).
In both countries, a disconnect exists between public sentiment on the one hand and institutional mechanisms and political will on the other. Adopting the euro requires meeting a set of demanding conditions: a budget deficit below 3% of GDP, a low and stable inflation rate, sustainable public debt, and two years of participation in the exchange rate stabilisation mechanism (ERM II). Despite a relative lack of popular enthusiasm for the euro, Bulgaria had long possessed an institutional framework that allowed euro adoption to emerge as a natural extension of the country’s monetary arrangements.
The Bulgarian Formula
Following a severe economic crisis in 1997, Bulgaria established a currency board, pegging the Bulgarian lev first to the German mark and later to the euro. The purpose of this arrangement was to counter the social, economic, and fiscal disruptions wrought by the crisis by ensuring macroeconomic stability through fiscal discipline. In doing so, Bulgaria effectively surrendered almost all autonomy in financial and economic matters: it could no longer intervene in the economy, pursue an interest rate adjustment policy, or issue currency (save under specific conditions).
For nearly three decades, Bulgarian institutions thus ensured the gradual alignment of the economy and public policy with the conditions required for adopting the common currency. More than that, one might argue that Bulgaria’s entry into the eurozone amounted to the formal recognition of an economic and fiscal reality that had been institutionally constructed over a long period.
The Perpetual Postponement
In Romania, while the euro has occasionally become a political talking point - particularly in the context of regional competition with Bulgaria - it has never become a genuine priority for the government or the country’s political and financial elites. On several occasions, Romania has pledged to adopt the euro within a three-to-four-year horizon, yet that horizon has been continuously deferred, regardless of the political complexion of the government in power.
Despite the fact that eurozone membership was enshrined in the 2005 accession treaty, adoption of the common currency today appears more distant than ever. The country’s fiscal situation is extremely precarious: Romania has the largest deficit (9.3% at end-2024) and the highest inflation rate in the European Union (nearly 10% in March 2026), alongside a bleak outlook for public debt (which could reach 80% of GDP in the absence of corrective measures, according to NBR estimates). The international environment - marked by heightened tensions, the proliferation of armed conflicts, and widespread instability - can only exert additional upward pressure on inflation, already aggravated by the deficit-reduction policies pursued by the Romanian government.
The new target date for euro adoption appears to be 2030 at the earliest, as stated by President Nicușor Dan in February 2026. Yet it may be more revealing to note that the project is not being prioritised even now: according to NBR Governor Mugur Isărescu, the most important step Romania must take is accession to theOECD, expected in 2026. This is indeed the project that commands consensus among the political elite. But why does eurozone membership carry so little weight in their eyes?
To account for this lack of political will, two factors merit particular attention in any attempt to explain the phenomenon: the entrenched tradition of electorally motivated spending policies, and the resistance of established parties to the structural reforms that euro adoption would require — such as the reform of state-owned enterprises.
The euro adoption process demands a degree of fiscal discipline that precludes, for instance, wage increases outpacing productivity growth. Yet the established parties - PSD and PNL - have repeatedly raised Romania’s minimum wage, average public sector salaries, and pensions, with a view to cementing the loyalty of their electorates ahead of elections. This strategy was deployed in 2024, ahead of the presidential and legislative elections, under a Social Democratic prime minister, but on that occasion it exposed its own limits: the established parties suffered heavy electoral losses in the face of the far right’s dramatic surge.
As regards the reforms required for euro adoption, the NBR considers that Romania must undertake far-reaching changes in the governance of state-owned enterprises, the organisation of the tourism sector, and other areas. Yet these reforms are unwelcome to the established parties, which have coalesced in recent years into what political scientists Vlad Adamescu and Răzvan Petri describe as a“political cartel” - drawing on the concept developed by Richard Katz and Peter Mair. State-owned enterprises, marked by opacity and sometimes teetering on the edge of insolvency, function as a reservoir in which parties can place their members to guarantee them a salary. Any policy aimed at reforming these companies promises to be exceedingly difficult to design and implement, owing above all to the inertia of clientelistic practices embedded in cartel parties.The evidence is plain to see: the new political crisis triggered on 23 April by the PSD’s withdrawal from the government must be understood, at least in part, as an expression of this resistance to reform.
The prospect of Romania adopting the euro is therefore not imminent. The institutional and political effort required runs up against the resistance of the country’s financial and political elites, who prefer to preserve the traditional instruments of political life. The euro appears to conflict with the priorities they have set for themselves, and the official discourse on an adoption timeline is little more than a way of managing international commitments. What is particularly striking is that popular enthusiasm for the euro has not translated into meaningful public pressure on the authorities to keep to the schedule they themselves have proposed. Ultimately, Romania’s apparent lag behind Bulgaria in joining the eurozone is merely a symptom of the deeper mechanisms at work in Romanian political life.
