Romania's coal reflex: how an ad-hoc alliance is gambling with Brussels's last deadline

Romania is currently trying to out-engineer a river. Unit 1 at the Cernavodă nuclear plant went dark on July 28th after Danube flow rates fell to their lowest in decades. Unit 2 was next in line, until the state decided a national power outage was a worse look than dynamite. On August 3rd, the navy blasted a rock formation out of the riverbed, and crews sank barges loaded with stone to force what little water is left toward the plant's intake pipes. The trick bought nine extra days, according to Nuclearelectrica's own accounting, but the reprieve is already spent. On August 11th the plant operator confirmed the last working reactor could shut down in two days, with the Danube's flow at the site down to a record low and the unit likely to stay offline for at least two weeks once it goes. A NATO member state has spent the better part of two weeks keeping its nuclear fleet alive with rocks and barges, in full view of a public that has watched one government fall and a second nominee rejected before ever taking office.

While the navy was blowing up riverbeds, parliament was quietly doing something that may cost Romania rather more than a nuclear plant. On August 5th, the Chamber of Deputies passed, for the second time, a decarbonization bill carrying a Senate amendment from the Social Democratic Party (PSD). This was waved through with votes from the far-right Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). The new rule is that no coal or lignite plant closes until a replacement is built, wired in, and running. It sailed through with barely a ripple in the domestic press, eclipsed by rock barges and reactor countdowns, which may be exactly why neither PSD nor AUR felt the need to explain it.

Framed as energy security, it plays well on television. However, what it actually does is unpick a commitment that involved Brussels paying Romania beforehand. This happened weeks before the country's recovery plan shuts its books for good.

A milestone Romania already cashed

This is not some distant target PSD is haggling over. Instead, it is Milestone 114 of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), the coal and lignite phase-out schedule Romania signed under emergency ordinance OUG 108/2022. The money for it has already landed, disbursed under the second payment request. Dragoș Pîslaru, the acting Minister of Investments and European Projects, told parliament he was holding a technical letter from the European Commission spelling out what happens next. The plan's reversibility clause will kick in and Romania can no longer submit payment requests for PNRR funds. Milestone 114 will be affected on a retroactive basis.

There is a second casualty. Milestone 119a carries a 771-million-euro grant tied to the plan's final disbursement. On August 7th the European Commission made its position explicit: Romania has not demonstrated that meeting the decarbonization targets would endanger power security. In any case, the milestone can no longer be revised. This is because it was locked in at July's review and the whole PNRR window closes on August 31st. There is no time to renegotiate, and no side deal is available.

Transelectrica, the state grid operator, produced an adequacy study recommending three lignite units at Rovinari and two at Turceni stay running as insurance. ACER, the EU's energy regulator, read the same study and found "unjustified methodological deviations". Brussels is not arguing that Romania's grid is fine. Instead, it is arguing that the paperwork Romania used to justify keeping the coal plants open does not add up. This is a more damaging accusation for Bucharest than a simple policy disagreement, as it suggests the numbers were built to fit the conclusion rather than the other way around.

The bill nobody who voted for it has to pay

Bolojan, speaking to RFI România on August 7th, did not even try to defend the amendment. He called it one of "at least two or three" changes rammed through by an "ad hoc alliance" of PSD and AUR. The amendment was passed, in his words, "solely for political reasons, to generate publicity or settle political scores". He gave the example of Craiova as part of his argument. Romania took 168 million euro in EU money to replace the plant there, poured hundreds of millions more into state aid to keep the old one limping along in the meantime, never built the replacement, and will eat financial penalties this autumn. This is happening “because we cannot leave a city without heating in winter”.

That admission is the whole story in miniature. Romania did not discover a coal problem in August. It built one, slowly, over years of governments, PSD-led and technocratic alike, that kept deferring the investment nobody wanted to pay for upfront. What August supplied was not a new crisis. Instead, it supplied an opportunity: a bill where voting "for energy security" costs nothing at home, while the bill for the underlying failure, and for the amendment itself, gets mailed to whoever is in office after the next election.

President Nicușor Dan has not been passive on this one. The evening the Senate adopted the bill, he posted that he would not promulgate the law in its current form: "If parliament adopts the law in the form resulting from the committee proceedings, I will analyse it with maximum responsibility, and I will use all constitutional prerogatives, including the request for reconsideration, so that Romania can submit the remaining payment requests and not lose billions of euros from the PNRR." That is a firmer stance than the usual presidential hedging. Dan can return the law to parliament once for reconsideration or seek a constitutional review, buying time but not an unlimited veto. If parliament re-adopts it and no constitutional objection succeeds, he must promulgate it within ten days. A presidential intervention would therefore be a meaningful delay and an opportunity to force political accountability, rather than a permanent check on the parliamentary majority.

The same alliance, the same playbook

This is not new choreography. In May, PSD and AUR voted together – 281 in favour – to bring down Bolojan's government, an alliance that should not have worked on paper but worked perfectly in practice. Weeks later, an AUR-drafted bill forcing NGOs to publish their funding sources cleared the Senate on PSD's votes. There was even a petition that gathered more than 30,000 signatures against it. Now it is coal. The credits change but the plot does not.

Sometimes AUR writes the script and PSD supplies the extra votes, as with the NGO law. Sometimes PSD writes it and AUR obliges, as with the coal amendment. Either way, no single party has to answer for what gets passed, and neither pays for it at home: energy security and NGO-bashing both poll well, even with voters who would never admit to liking AUR.

PSD's leadership keeps insisting its European loyalties are intact. Sorin Grindeanu has taken credit for PSD votes that saved billions of euros elsewhere in the PNRR, and the party has never formally shut the door on rejoining a pro-EU coalition. That is hard to square with a coal amendment that guts a commitment PSD's own governments wrote into the plan in the first place, and which were passed with votes from the one party with which PSD supposedly has nothing in common. Voters, for their part, seem unbothered by the contradiction; there is little evidence either party's poll numbers have suffered for it.

A pattern that reaches beyond Romania

Romania is not unique in facing a collision between domestic political incentives and commitments made in Brussels. Poland under PiS and Hungary under Fidesz illustrate how governments can contest EU rule-of-law and governance conditionality while continuing to rely on EU funding. They also show how the EU’s legal and financial enforcement mechanisms often operate on a slower timetable than domestic politics. But Romania’s coal amendment is a different mechanism: not a governing majority using its own stable mandate to challenge Brussels, but an ad-hoc parliamentary alignment between the traditional left and the nationalist right reopening a reform whose entry into force underpinned a PNRR payment Romania had already received. What makes it distinctive is the timing. It lands in the final weeks of the PNRR window, amid a nuclear emergency that has consumed political and media attention.

What the deadline will actually measure

Bolojan's own verdict, delivered the same day, was blunter than most: "With all their shortcomings, a large part of these milestones has been addressed in parliament over the past two weeks, but at the cost of what I would call the mutilation of some of these laws." That is a caretaker government watching its own parliament check boxes it is not sure will survive contact with Brussels's auditors, or with Romania's Constitutional Court.

Brussels has until the end of August to decide how much of this it will tolerate. But the coal amendment has already settled a question that has been open since Bolojan's government fell in May: whether PSD and AUR are occasional bedfellows or a standing arrangement for whenever one of them needs votes the other mainstream parties will not supply. Three votes, three months, one pattern. Romania is spending its energy security, and a slice of its recovery money, to keep that arrangement running quietly in the background, and there is no sign yet that anyone in Bucharest intends to send the bill back where it belongs.

Björn Anseeuw is a strategic consultant specialising in energy markets, investment analysis and political-economic risk in Europe. He is a former member of the Flemish and Belgian federal parliaments (2014–2024) and is based in Brașov, Romania.