LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Fitch will wait for Romania’s current political crisis to settle before deciding whether to maintain or strip it of its prized investment grade credit rating, the firm’s analyst for the country said on Wednesday. The junior USR-Plus partner in Romania’s centrist coalition government removed its ministers from the country’s cabinet on Tuesday, paving the way for a parliamentary vote of no-confidence against Liberal Prime Minister Florin Citu. The fracture of the three-party coalition, which includes Romania’s largest party, Citu’s Liberals, an ethnic Hungarian group and the USR-Plus, could endanger ambitious plans to reduce the Black Sea state’s gaping budget deficit. “There are multiple consequences of this political crisis,” Fitch’s sovereign analyst for Romania, Federico Barriga Salazar, told a webinar Q&A session. The key risk for the BBB- rating, which is the lowest investment grade rung and is on a downgrade warning, is if the situation derails repairing the country’s finances and ramps up public debt further. “We’ll have to take a little bit of time and see how it progresses... but I think where we are placed with a negative outlook, sort of encompasses this balance of risk relatively well at the moment,” Barriga Salazar said “So we’ll just have to follow through a little bit and wait until the political dust settles.” Being stripped of an investment grade credit rating can push up a country’s borrowing costs as international investors widely regard “junk”-rated countries as more risky. Romania’s debt-to-GDP ratio has risen to nearly 55% from around 35% in 2017 and last year it had one of the largest budget deficits in the 27 member European Union at 9.3%. Economists have been expecting the economy to rebound around 5% this year and stay strong, supported by a multi-year infrastructure plan. Earlier this year another rating firm, S&P Global, took the country off its own downgrade warning. (Reporting by Marc Jones Editing by Chris Reese) Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.