site.btaMedia Review: June 4

POLITICS

This time around, there will not be as many international observers as in previous elections, said in a BNR interview Desislava Hristova, who has many years of experience in election observation. She stressed that it is important to have someone outside the narrow partisan interest to monitor the equal access of citizens to the electoral process.

On election day, observers monitor whether the polling station is properly arranged, whether the environment is accessible for people with physical disabilities, whether the secrecy of the vote is maintained, they also monitor for complaints, and at closing time - how the ballots are taken out, how the votes are counted and how the protocols are filled in, Hristova explained, adding that frequent elections make it difficult to consider recommendations to improve the electoral process.

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In the upcoming elections on June 9, voters must decide how they are going to vote, by paper or machine, and also whether they will be voting for one election, or both (Bulgarian and European parliaments), because they will not be allowed to change their mind once they have left the booth, Polina Vitanova, secretary of Sofia’s 23rd Regional Election Commission, said on the morning show of BNT.

"The protocols always turn out to be the most complicated, the most difficult and the slowest of actions that the sectional election commissions have to carry out. There are lots of candidates, many numbers will need to be entered accurately," she said.

ECONOMY

The average salary in Bulgaria has risen to BGN 2,198. Petar Ganev, senior research fellow at the Institute for Market Economics, and Dobromir Ivanov, BESCO executive director, appeared on the morning show of Nova TV to analyze what accounts for the increase, whether it is catching up with inflation, and whether Bulgarians have felt the 17% increase in incomes over the last year.

"The picture is not changing dramatically from what we have been used to seeing for the last decades. Excluding the crises that have befallen us. We are in a period where wages are growing solidly by up to 17%. This is obviously higher than the European average. And higher than the inflation rate. At the end of 2022, when inflation was at its highest - there was a point where people were losing real income. Except those who had pension increases. Working people faced higher inflation than wage growth. But this trend has reversed," Petar Ganev said.

In Ivanov's words, wages have actually doubled in the last five years. "If we have to look at the total for everyone - certainly the increase in wages is greater than inflation over the whole period. Yet, there was a moment when inflation was outpacing," he explained.

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Salaries in emergency care are increased by BGN 5, according to representatives of the “Zashtita” trade union, Trud and other media report. Employees in emergency care call this a mockery and are preparing for a protest on Thursday, June 6.

They are also demanding the resignation of caretaker Health Minister Galya Kondeva, with whom they have scheduled a meeting to discuss the problems in the sector. The protesters insist on a reallocation of government funds.

The leadership of “Zashtita” will make another attempt to meet with Kondeva to reach an agreement and sign a national framework agreement, after the current contract expired in April. The trade unions said they were ready for protests over the requested wage increase for health workers, which they said was insulting in size.

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Cattle breeders are protesting on Tuesday, the national radio said. They are setting up tents on the National Road I-6 and starting Wednesday, they will block the road for an hour a day.

The reason for their discontent is that over the last 25 years they have not been allowed to take their animals out to graze in the Balkan Mountains.

The problem of restricted grazing affects the whole of Central Bulgaria, including the municipalities of Kalofer, Karlovo, Pavel Banya.

The breeders have appealed to all institutions, including the prosecutor's office. In mid-May they again sent letters to the Ministries of Agriculture and of Environment.

The breeders have support from the local administration - the mayors of Kalofer, Karlovo and Pavel Banya, but the state remains silent and inactive.

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The crisis of hiring third-country workers for seasonal work by the seaside continues, Nova reports. Some of the hotels are opening later this summer due to lack of staff. "I was optimistic, but months ago we told the caretaker tourism minister Evtim Miloshev that the Foreign Ministry has no administrative capacity. I was expecting 40% of the third-country workers to arrive on June 1. Some of them have visas, others do not. The issue continues to be delayed. We will start work on time, we will make efforts. But we cannot work as we should to offer tourists a quality service," said Veselin Nalbantov, the deputy chairman of the Bulgarian Hotel and Restaurant Association.

JUSTICE

The Ministry of Justice must comply with the law - in an accelerated order to propose new texts in the draft of the new Judicial System Act (JSA), which do not concern changes in the Constitution. This opinion was expressed to BNR by the District Prosecutor of Ruse, Georgi Georgiev.

Asked whether a new JSA or new criminal legislation were more necessary, the district prosecutor said that a change in their work requires changes in both laws.

Regarding the JSA, Georgiev criticized the short deadlines for the adoption of the law and stressed that there are many remarks to this draft.

Some of the changes in the new law correspond to the changes in the Constitution, the prosecutor said.

"However, there are also changes that worry us. We are worried that a dividing line is being drawn between prosecutors and judges in different institutions. The feeling remains that we do not have support from the state. The prosecutors are the state prosecutors,” he said, adding that such treatment of prosecutors is not beneficial for society.

"With every change, our status is being differentiated from that of judges, and this makes us feel like second-class magistrates," the Ruse District Prosecutor said.

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On Tuesday, the Judges' College of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) will consider the report of the ad hoc Parliamentary Committee investigating the facts and circumstances related to the participation of judges in the activities of the group around Martin Bojanov, aka The Notary, who was killed on the evening of 31 January, bTV reports.

At its last meeting, the committee decided to report on its work to date to the College, and to request an extension until September 30.

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Later, BNR reported that due to lack of quorum, the meeting of the College failed. It turned out that five of the judicial staff are on vacation and one is sick and there is no majority to hold a meeting. The College will next attempt to consider the report and decide whether the committee's work needs to continue until September 30, as it has proposed.

CULTURE

The Prima of Bulgarian popular music Lili Ivanova was awarded in Veliko Tarnovo with a special Golden Age award with a necklace of the Ministry of Culture, Trud reports. Minister Nayden Todorov personally awarded Lili Ivanova for her outstanding contribution to Bulgarian culture and the development of cultural cooperation. This happened after Lili Ivanova's concert at the Vasil Levski Palace of Culture and Sports in Veliko Tarnovo on Monday evening, where she was applauded by more than 2000 admirers.