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Romania’s Senate did something on Wednesday that would have seemed unthinkable a month ago: it looked straight at a threat from two of the European Parliament’s biggest political families and voted anyway. The new Integrity Law passed with 106 votes in favor and 19 against, and the only senators who opposed it were from USR, the party of Timișoara’s mayor, Dominic Fritz. Not PSD, not PNL, not AUR. Just USR, alone, defending one man’s job.
The law, formally known as the “Legea ANI,” is a PNRR milestone, one of the technical boxes Romania has to tick by August 31 to unlock €770 million in EU recovery funds. Buried inside it is the so-called “Fritz amendment”: a clause stating that ANY public official whose incompatibility or conflict of interest has been definitively established by a court loses their mandate 30 days after the law takes effect, provided the three-year ban period hasn’t already expired.
This isn’t a hypothetical. Four Romanian courts have ruled, unanimously, that Fritz was in a conflict of interest when he signed a zoning document (PUZ) benefiting someone who had donated to his campaign. The Constitutional Court weighed in on August 17 and confirmed the amendment is fully constitutional. So, by the time the Senate voted this week, this wasn’t really a debate about whether Fritz broke the rules, the courts had already settled that months ago. The vote was about whether Romania’s Parliament would let the ruling actually mean something. It did. The bill now heads to President Nicușor Dan for promulgation, and once it’s in force, Fritz and more than 120 other officials in similar legal situations will have 30 days to hand over their positions.
Here’s where the story gets genuinely interesting, and where a lot of the usual political scripts got torn up. AUR voted for the integrity law today in the Senate. AUR President George Simion was blunt about it: AUR backed the so-called Fritz amendment “because it’s normal, whoever is incompatible has to go home”. AUR aligned with the actual court decisions, four rulings and a Constitutional Court confirmation, while insisting the standard should apply to everyone equally, not just to convenient targets. Notably, AUR had earlier tried to expand the law further, pushing for politicians’ life partners to also have to declare assets, though that piece didn’t survive into the final Senate text.
Now for the part that’s harder to spin. USR has spent years building its brand on exactly one promise: zero tolerance for corruption and conflicts of interest, no matter who’s involved. That’s the entire reason the party exists. Yet when the courts found their own party president in a textbook conflict-of-interest situation for profiting a campaign donor through an official zoning decision, USR’s senators were the only bloc in the entire chamber to vote against enforcing the law.
The party didn’t stop at voting no domestically. It escalated to Brussels. Because USR sits inside the Renew Europe group, and PNL’s Bolojan wing sits inside the European People’s Party, both European party families sent a joint letter dated August 24, signed by EPP leader Manfred Weber and Renew Europe leader Valérie Hayer, asking European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to withhold the €770 million in PNRR funds unless Bucharest scraps the amendment. The letter frames this as a rule-of-law concern, arguing the Commission shouldn’t treat the payment as a “purely technical” matter and should instead verify whether Romania’s reform respects EU legal standards.
Weber later tried to soften the message, saying publicly that the EPP doesn’t want Romania to lose “a single euro” from its recovery funds. But the letter itself is unambiguous: it explicitly ties the money to reversing a specific legislative provision aimed, in practice, at one named individual, whose legal problems were established by Romanian courts, not by political opponents.
Strip away the acronyms and what’s left is a genuinely awkward picture. A Romanian mayor whose own country’s courts, at four separate levels plus the Constitutional Court, found him in conflict of interest is being shielded not by Romanian institutions but by foreign party leaders, pressuring Brussels to financially punish 20 million Romanians unless one mayor’s job is protected. Reporting has also noted that PNL’s Siegfried Mureșan lobbied Weber directly on Fritz’s behalf, which helps explain why a center-right party found itself defending a Renew-aligned mayor at all.
Fritz himself hasn’t been quiet, calling the Constitutional Court’s ruling a “brutal abuse of power” that the court “validated” rather than stopped, and arguing the law’s redefinition of normative acts like a PUZ perversely narrows what counts as a conflict of interest going forward. That’s a legitimate legal argument to make in Romanian courts or the Constitutional Court, both of which he’s already lost. Turning it into a lobbying campaign aimed at Romania’s EU funding, run through party structures in Brussels, is a different thing entirely.
The deeper issue isn’t really about Fritz’s zoning permit anymore, it’s about whether a European party family gets to override a national court ruling by threatening a country’s recovery money. Romania has plenty of legitimate rule-of-law problems worth scrutiny. Enforcing a court decision that a specific official broke conflict-of-interest rules isn’t one of them. It’s the opposite.