Romania Given Two Weeks on Integrity Law

Romania has been given a fortnight to explain to the European Commission why a disputed clause in its new integrity law does not breach basic EU legal standards.

The question from Brussels, sent on 2 September by the Commission's justice directorate, is a precise one. Did Bucharest create a penalty for past conduct after the fact? Is the sanction proportionate to the offence? And could the officeholders affected have known, at the time, that this would be the consequence? (RFI, Digi24).

That moves the row out of domestic politics and into the machinery of EU funding. Romania's answer will be folded into the assessment of its sixth and final payment request under the Recovery and Resilience Facility, the EU's post-pandemic fund that releases money only when governments deliver reforms they have already promised.

A reform that became a fight

Romania's parliament passed Law 180/2026 on 26 August, three days before a hard deadline for completing recovery-plan milestones (Europa FM). The law was meant to close a genuine loophole. ANI, Romania's integrity watchdog, had found elected officials in breach of conflict-of-interest rules, only for some of them to remain in office because the old system barred them from future posts rather than removing them from the one they already held (Juridice, Stiripesurse).

The political fight is over the so-called Fritz amendment. It applies the new loss-of-office rule to cases already final before the law came into force. Officials covered by those earlier findings lose their posts 30 days after the law takes effect (Agerpres).

ANI says 55 officeholders, including 10 mayors, are now caught by the provision (Agerpres). Its name comes from its best-known target: Dominic Fritz, the German-born mayor of Timișoara and leader of the USR party, whose conflict-of-interest finding was upheld by Romania's High Court in June (HotNews).

Romania's Constitutional Court upheld the clause. Its view was that the law changes what follows from an already final finding, rather than retrospectively criminalising the original behaviour (Gandul). President Nicușor Dan then signed it into force, while saying publicly that he disagreed with the amendment but did not want to put recovery-fund money at risk (Agerpres, Sintact).

Where the pressure comes from

The push in Brussels came from two European Parliament party leaders: Manfred Weber of the EPP and Valérie Hayer of Renew. They asked Commission president Ursula von der Leyen to treat the clause as a matter of EU rights, arguing that it interferes with the treaty right of EU citizens to stand in local elections in any member state (Agerpres, FAZ).

The Commission has kept its response procedural. Rather than pronounce on the amendment separately, it will assess the law as part of Romania's final recovery-fund payment request, expected this month (ActMedia, G4Media).

The money question

The figure attached to the row is €770 million. It is a real number, but it has been attached too neatly to the Fritz amendment. Interim Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan linked that loss to the wage-law reform that parliament failed to pass by the 31 August deadline (HotNews). The sum covers Romania's entire final grant instalment across several milestones, not one disputed clause (EU Perspectives). No public Commission document found in this research ties the full amount to the integrity law alone.

That does not mean the integrity law is financially harmless. Under the recovery fund rules, Brussels can withhold the relevant part of a payment if it concludes that a reform has not been properly delivered (Regulation 2021/241). Romania now has two weeks to persuade the Commission that the law completes the integrity milestone rather than undermining it. The test is no longer whether Bucharest passed something by the deadline. It is whether what it passed can survive legal scrutiny.