site.btaPM: Bulgaria's Eurozone Entry Target Is January 1, 2025

"Our goal for joining the euro area is January 1, 2025," Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said during the first of the year question time in Parliament on Friday.

He said there was no way to circumvent the Maastricht criteria because they were part of the EU treaties. These criteria have a procedure that allows in certain cases to find countries that, for specific reasons, can be excluded from the relevant calculation of average inflation, Denkov said. This thing was done with regard to Croatia when it adopted the euro, he added, stressing that this was not against the rules, but according to the rules. It cannot be done at the will of a prime minister or a finance minister, but in accordance with the rules as they are written in the treaties, Denkov noted. "We will follow all the rules as they are at the moment in order to join the euro area," the prime minister said. 

He also said that the exchange rate of the leva is fixed by an act of the present National Assembly and nobody, never and on no occasion since the formation of this government has discussed changing this exchange rate, on the contrary, everywhere it is said that it should be maintained because it has shown that it is appropriate after the lev was pegged to the deutsche mark and then to the euro.