BUCHAREST: Romania's top court ruled on Wednesday that double digit wage hikes for state workers in education and healthcare approved one month before Sunday's parliamentary election were constitutional, chief justice Valer Dorneanu said.
Romania's temporary technocrat cabinet had mounted a legal challenge against the wage hikes, which have the backing of the leftist Social Democrats and their allies, who even before Sunday's election had a comfortable parliamentary majority.
The Social Democrats won Sunday's election on promises to further raise wages and pensions in one of the European Union's poorest member states.
The European Commission will closely watch the new government's budget plans as its propensity for higher public spending risks breaching the EU's deficit ceiling of 3 percent of gross domestic product.
The outgoing technocrat cabinet had argued that under existing Romanian law wages and pensions cannot be raised six months before an election. But the Constitutional Court upheld the wage hikes without explanation.
It will publish at a later date the reason for its ruling. The wage hikes, which average 15 percent, won parliamentary approval in early November against the wishes of the technocrat cabinet, which says they will raise the public sector wage bill by 4.85 billion lei ($1.14 billion).
Romania collects revenues worth just under 35 percent of GDP, significantly below the EU average of 44.5 percent.
Of these, more than half the funds are directed towards state wages, pensions, unemployment and other social assistance and only a fraction towards improving dilapidated road and health infrastructure.
The Social Democrats are returning to power a year after they quit amid mass street protests against corruption following a deadly nightclub fire. Romania has been run since then by the cabinet of technocrats for a term limited to one year.
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