For almost two years, more than 924,000 seniors are condemned to live on a minimum pension of 1,281 lei per month, an amount that no longer means a living, but mere survival. The Romanian state's indifference to their needs violates their right to a decent standard of living as provided for in Article 47 of the Romanian Constitution and represents an abuse by which the state condemns one in five elderly people in Romania to extreme poverty.
The Romanian state officially allocates them 43 lei a day for food, medicine, utilities and everything else they need for a decent life. In reality, the poverty line requires at least 63 lei a day. This money does not even cover the bare necessities. According to the latest data, the minimum consumption basket for an adult has reached 4,322 lei per month. At this level, the minimum pension barely covers a quarter of real needs. While food, energy and medicine prices have soared, the state has frozen the incomes of the most vulnerable ones. In practice, poverty is no longer a risk but an indefinite sentence.
The consequences are dramatic: for hundreds of thousands of elderly people, food, medical treatment and paying bills have become options, not entitlements. Every month is a painful calculation: between pills and food, between light and heat. This is the silent reality of social Romania in 2025.
The picture becomes even harsher when you look at the rest of Europe. While Romania maintains a minimum pension of around €255, Bulgaria offers more than €320 and Poland around €415 a month. In the west of the continent, the discrepancies are dramatic: Italy - around €600, Spain - over €825, France - over €1,000, and in Germany, social support for low-income seniors, together with housing costs, reaches similar levels.
This means a senior in Romania is forced to live on almost four times less income than a senior citizen in developed European countries.
In this context, FACIAS calls on the Government to immediately increase the minimum pension in line with inflation and the current cost of living in order to prevent this situation from turning into a major social crisis. For hundreds of thousands of senior Romanians, every month of delay is no longer a simple matter of public policy