site.btaEven Caretaker Government Can Ensure Eurozone Entry in 2025 - Finance Minister

Bulgaria can join the euro area in 2025, and the job can be done by a caretaker cabinet as well as a regular one, outgoing Finance Minister Assen Vassilev said on Nova TV on Sunday.

Vassilev said: "The European Commission issued a clear message to Bulgaria last week after it became clear that there would be no government. The European Council conclusions say that the European Commission hails Bulgaria's progress, and the only thing left to take care of is inflation. As soon as we meet this criterion, we can ask for a report."

Vassilev also discussed Bulgaria's Schengen membership, which became a fact on Sunday only in part, as air and sea border controls between Bulgaria and the Schengen area were lifted, leaving land border controls in place. The finance minister said talks with Austria on the land border issue are going on and should be handled by the future Bulgarian caretaker government. He does not expect the upcoming elections in this country to cause a dramatic delay because Bulgaria and Romania are coupled together. "It helps when our two countries move in tandem. After the Netherlands decided to support a full admission, including by land, there is no way to split the tandem," he explained. He added that the decision on the land border issue can be made by the end of 2024 and controls can be lifted in 2025.

There has been only one interior minister in Bulgaria's recent history who managed to limit vote buying and election rigging, and that is Boyko Rashkov, the finance minister went on to say. According to him, the current holder of the office, Kalin Stoyanov, failed in this, and should be replaced, but that is up to Prime Minister-designate Dimitar Glavchev and President Rumen Radev. Vassilev fears that the voting process will be manipulated "again" to discredit machine voting in favour of paper ballots. The exclusive use of paper ballots will make election rigging very easy, he said.

Vassilev, who is co-leader of Continue the Change (CC), one of the parties behind the outgoing government, said that "last Friday" (apparently meaning March 22) he met in the National Assembly with Boyko Borissov, the leader of CC's partner GERB. "It was a very honest meeting," Vassilev pointed out. He asked Borissov whether GERB was ready to renounce the fixing of competitions for recruiting regulatory authority members. Borissov said "maybe" and wondered whether the Bulgarian state was ready for it.