site.btaVazrazhdane Leader Protests Against Spending Millions to Fight Anti-Semitism in Bulgaria

The leader of the nationalist Vazrazhdane party, Kostadin Kostadinov, argued in a Facebook post on Friday that Bulgaria plans to spend too much money on fighting anti-Semitism. He noted that anti-Semitism is actually non-existent in Bulgaria.

Kostadinov noted that the government allocated BGN 7,778,000 for the implementation of a strategy to combat anti-Semitism. This money will be spent by 2027, in other words, BGN 2 million per year will be set aside "to fight something that does not exist in Bulgaria", he wrote.

According to the MP, there is a negligible number of Jews in Bulgaria, "only a few hundred". "They are traditionally fully integrated into the Bulgarian nation and practically all of them, without exception, come from mixed marriages with Bulgarians. So in practice they are our compatriots."

"Apart from the Jews, the other Semites in Bulgaria are the Arabs, who are slightly more numerous, but they too are fully integrated into Bulgarian society and nation. With them, too, intermarriage is a rule, and especially the second and third generations are indistinguishable from the Bulgarians."

"It is noteworthy, however, that the strategy envisages fighting only against anti-Jewish but not anti-Arab sentiments, which is interesting given that both communities are Semitic, and this is a strategy against anti-Semitism after all."

"Anti-Semitism is a historical phenomenon inherent in almost all of Europe, but not in Bulgaria. Instead of this money being spent on Bulgarian children, it will literally be thrown into the sea, if only the puppet government of CC-DB-MRF-GERB [Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria, Movement for Rights and Freedoms, GERB-UDF] can prove itself to its masters. And there are so many of them that I find it difficult to list the foreign countries to which the supposedly 'Bulgarian' rulers bow."