The government assumed responsibility in the Parliament on Monday for a bill proposing an uninominal voting system for Romania, different from the one that President Traian Basescu is pushing for through a referendum later this year.

Political parties can submit censure motions against the Government within three days since it took responsibility. But the key challenge came from the head of state, who said he would not approve the new law before the referendum on his own verion of uninominal voting, due to take place in late November.

Parliamentary groups had submitted 113 amendments to the bill the government assumed responsibility for.

But PM Calin Popescu Tariceanu and his minister only included 23 of them in the final version of the legislation, including an opposition-supported proposal that heads of county councils should be elected by uninominal votes.

President Basescu said on Monday night that he will use all legal procedures and will only adopt the law after the referendum would be held. Basescu said he already sent a letter to PM Tariceanu in which he requested that both the referendum and the country's first European Parliament elections be held in the same sections.

The main reason for which Basescu wants to pass his version of the uninominal voting system argues that the version assumed by the government is incomplete and lets room for interpretation.