Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V: Niculescu pieced together his program from his failed predecessors' plans

Literally identical paragraphs, the same figures, deadlines and lists: according to an analysis by news.ro, the government program backed by the PSD and attributed to Luca Niculescu – submitted to parliament on Thursday – copied, in several chapters, passages from the program published a month earlier by the PNL–USR–UDMR coalition led by Siegfried Mureșan, as well as from the document submitted by Adrian Veștea in June. The most striking overlaps with the Mureșan program are found in the financial chapter, in the infrastructure financed through the EU's SAFE defense loan facility, and in the restructuring of state-owned companies, but there are also similarities in the sections on the intelligence services, healthcare and public administration. News.ro also sent questions to Niculescu's team, but had not received a reply by the time the article was published.

The most telling example is the paragraph on fiscal responsibility. Page 63 of the Mureșan program states that the principle of fiscal responsibility is undertaken by “all the parties forming the government”, followed by a long, technically detailed string of sentences listing the deficit target below 3 percent, the net expenditure path, debt stabilization, and the reduction of personnel and social spending as a share of GDP by 2031. On page 6 of the Niculescu program, the same paragraph is repeated almost word for word. There are two small changes: “solidarity” has been added alongside responsibility, and the parties “forming the government” have become the parties “supporting the government.” However, the plural has remained: the document still speaks of “all the parties”, even though, in theory, this is the government program of a single party, the PSD. This is a telltale leftover, and it also creates an odd situation in terms of content, since it extends the commitments to the PNL and the UDMR as well – parties that will only vote for the government at the investiture.

The most revealing thing, however, is what the PSD rewrote. Page 68 of the Mureșan program states that the 2025–2026 fiscal adjustment – that is, the measures associated with Bolojan – “worked,” while the Niculescu program, in the same paragraph, now states that the adjustment “produced results, at a high economic and social cost”. The rest of the text is identical: 2027 is the consolidation's “test year,” the non-repayable grants from the recovery fund come to an end, interest expenses approach three percent of GDP, and excess revenue is treated as a reserve rather than as a budgetary baseline assumption. The PSD carefully swapped in updated figures: instead of the seven-month deficit of 2.34 percent, the eight-month figure of 2.89 percent now appears. This addition thus signals exactly the political distance the PSD wants to keep from the austerity measures of the Bolojan government – the very government it itself brought down together with AUR in May, and whose fiscal trajectory it is now nevertheless adopting word for word.

In the capital markets chapter, the overlap is complete. Measures M24 and M25 of the Niculescu program repeat verbatim chapter 8.1 of the Mureșan program: the capital market as an alternative source of financing, the launch of savings and investment accounts in January 2027, the annual €400 tax relief for investments in shares, bonds and ETFs, the additional 50 percent deduction for stock exchange listing costs, and the simplified prospectus for small and medium-sized enterprises all appear in exactly the same words. The overlaps with Adrian Veștea's June program are looser but still concrete: the “Diaspora Investește Acasă” program appears in both documents under the same name, with the same €100 million budget, the same 2026–2029 timeframe, and the same role for the Development and Investment Bank. Both also include the continuation of the TEZAUR and FIDELIS government bond programs, the list of regional hospitals in Iași, Cluj-Napoca and Craiova, and the negotiating goal that cohesion policy should account for roughly a third of the next EU budget.

In defense, one could argue that in Romania, too, government programs are largely drafted by ministerial technical staff, and that the fiscal trajectory is a commitment agreed with Brussels, not a matter of party taste. The text drafted by the Bolojan government's financial experts is therefore bound to resurface, no matter who sits in the prime minister's chair – except that the original paragraphs come from the program of a coalition whose accession to government the PSD blocked in parliament, and whose policies the party has for months called a synonym for “fleecing the people.” If the PSD truly had different ideas, it would hardly copy them out of a rival's document, carefully swapping out the word “worked.”

It is quite something that plagiarism confronts us at the highest level of the state, in the submission of a government program – but then, this is Romania, where copying is practically considered a basic skill for anyone who wants to make it into higher circles. Plagiarism scandals have become almost routine in Romanian public life: in 2012 it emerged that former Prime Minister Victor Ponta had copied large parts of his doctoral thesis, and he later gave up his title; former Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă and former Interior Minister Lucian Bode have also faced plagiarism accusations over their theses. The phenomenon is not confined to politics, either: in the media, too, it is common for editors to take over texts, information and ideas without attribution. The Niculescu program is just another chapter in this line; the only difference is that this time it is not a diploma but a country's plan for the coming year that was put together with scissors and glue – and at the seam, in the plural of “toate partidele” (“all the parties”), the cut is still visible.

Ugar