French President Macron invites Romania to be partner in EU reform

From a future EU reform to Romania's entry to the Schengen area, the visit of French president Emmanuel Macron to Bucharest tackled a range of political and economic issues. Macron promised to strengthen the strategic partnership between France and Romania and said he would return to the country next year to symbolically plant an oak tree in Iasi, a city in Eastern Romania. During his 8-hour visit to Bucharest, Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte visited the Village Museum together with Romanian President Klaus Iohannis and wife Carmen Iohannis. Posted workers President Klaus Iohannis pointed to the concerns of both sides on the posted worker directive but did not go into the specifics of what this could look like. He said the posted workers directive should be improved, considering that there is so much criticism about it. “We need to see things as they are. On the one hand, there is dissatisfaction in France that there are workers that are apparently trying to elude the system, rather than fit into it. On the other hand, we can see there are very many Eastern Europeans, for instance people in Romania, who want to work in Spain, Germany, France. If this is the situation, it is very clear we need to improve this directive. It is unacceptable to see this dissatisfaction, on the one hand in Western Europe, on the other hand, the wish of people in the East to live better. Both are legitimate, and if this directive produced such disagreements in approach, it doesn’t mean that people in France are not right or that people in Romania are not right. It means the directive is not clear or good enough,” Iohannis said, quoted by News.ro. The Romanian president said “nobody wants to remove competition or the free market” but rewriting the directive was not enough. “A much tighter collaboration is needed,” Iohannis said. In his turn, French president Emmanuel Macron said France would not take the road transport out of the new agreement on posted workers that should be reached by October of this year. “I would like it to be no ambiguity about the road transport. We are talking about two different things. France is not taking the road transport out of the agreement and we will continue to talk about this, but there are two different things. When I speak of the French road transporters who recruit Romanians, these fall under the agreement we hope to obtain. It is a form of posted work. If a French road transporter employs Romanian drivers in France for Romanian salaries, this falls under the directive concerning transport and will be covered by the agreement I hope to reach by October, so this has not been taken out of the agreement.” At the same time, Macron said he would not accept that French transporters practice social dumping. “I don’t accept that French transporters practice social dumping by employing people from countries with low labor costs because this is a breach of European rights. The road transport sector falls under this through the reform of this directive, and we will go all the way. At the same time, it is absolutely legitimate for countries where the road transport is important to develop all over Europe,” Macron said. Meanwhile, the local Trade Union National Bloc (BNS) said it was supporting the European Parliament’s and Council’s proposal for the revision of the directive concerning posted workers in the services sector, according to