Bucharest -
Romania's new centre-left government won formal approval from parliament on Monday, promising to stick to a deal with international lenders while seeking to correct social imbalances.
The cabinet, led by the left-leaning Social Liberal Union (USL), garnered 284 votes for and 92 against, the official vote count showed.
“We are ready to start implementing fundamental changes for Romanians”, Prime Minister Victor Ponta, 39, told lawmakers.
The mandate of Ponta's government will be limited however, with general elections due in November.
A former prosecutor and an admirer of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara, Ponta was named 10 days ago to take over from Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, whose government collapsed after an opposition no-confidence vote.
“We are determined to abide by Romania's commitments towards its partners and we have drawn up a new letter of intent with the International Monetary Fund aimed at giving a message of stability,” he told lawmakers.
“But our major commitment is towards the Romanian people,” he added, stressing that his government would seek to “correct social injustices” generated by the austerity measures taken in 2010, when public wages were cut by 25 percent.
New Finance Minister Florin Georgescu, up to now a deputy governor of the central bank, said the IMF had agreed to restore public sector wages to pre-2010 levels.
This would mean increasing the pubic deficit target set for this year to 2.25 percent of gross domestic product.
Romania obtained a 20-billion-euro ($26-billion) rescue package from the IMF, the EU and the World Bank in 2009, in exchange for steps to cut public spending, which helped it emerge from recession.
In March 2011, the IMF and the EU agreed to provide the Balkan country with a fresh credit line of five billion euros to be drawn only in case of an emergency.
“The new government will have no choice but to pursue the reforms, although I don't see a very strong will to go ahead especially with the privatisation plans,” economic analyst Bogdan Baltazar told AFP.
The new cabinet is made up of 20 portfolios, evenly split between Ponta's Social Democrats and the Liberals, who make up the USL.
An economist unknown to the general public, Daniel Chitoiu, who headed the fiscal administration under the Liberal government, will run the economy ministry.
Chitoiu told an economic committee that he would abide by the deal with the IMF on selling off energy companies and restructuring loss-making state-owned enterprises, although the USL had criticised the outgoing government over these measures.
The foreign ministry will be headed by Andrei Marga, a former education minister with no experience in diplomacy who has virulently attacked Basescu in recent months, auguring ill for cooperation on crucial issues.
The justice portfolio will go to Social Democrat Titus Corlatean, whose job will be to persuade the European Union that judicial reform will continue and that high-level corruption cases will not be hampered by political interference. - Sapa-AFP