site.btaUPDATED GERB’s PM Nominee Presents Priorities, Starts with Removal of Prosecutor General Geshev

The GERB-UDF nominee for Prime Minister, Mariya Gabriel, Thursday presented her priorities before starting a series of meeting with the political parties in Parliament to seek their support for a government. She started the list of priorities with the removal of Prosecutor General Ivan Geshev. "The first thing that the justice minister in my cabinet will do is to submit to the Supreme Judicial Council a request for Ivan Geshev's dismissal (as Prosecutor General) due to damaging the Judiciary's reputation," Gabriel said in front of GERB-UDF's Parliamentary Group.

She listed ten priorities covering a broad range of issues that this country is facing.

Here are all of them, in the order Gabriel listed them:

• A plan for ending the political crisis and forming a working government; normalization of the work of institutions;
• Stabilizing public finances and adopting a budget [for 2023];
• Judicial reform, adopting key laws (a mechanism for investigating the prosecutor general, reforming the anti-corruption commission and its split into a commission with investigative functions and an asset forfeiture commission). Things should not stop here and should continue with a constitutional reform;
• Handling inflation;
• Entry in the Eurozone;
• Making up for the two-year delay of operational programmes, the Rural Development Programme and the Recovery and Resilience Plan;
• Improving security for people and dealing with conventional crime, improving road safety; handling the migration pressure; entry in Schengen; modernization of the Armed Forces; active participation of Bulgaria in the common EU policy for security and defence; meeting the commitments this country has made as a NATO member;
• Stepping up the development of education, science, innovation, culture, the strategic sectors involved in the green and digital transition, including digitization of the public sector;
• Overcoming regional disparities by targeted action to encourage skills based on the labour market needs;
• Implementing efficient health policy to improve public health; active participation in the EU drive to combat cancer; facing the health challenges through prevention, access to treatment and new technologies and high-precision medicine. 

Gabriel will be meeting Thursday with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, BSP for Bulgaria and There Is Such a People. The second largest group in Parliament, Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria, said they would meet with her on Friday because some of the alliance leaders are out of the country.

Gabriel has taken a leave as EU Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth as she is trying to form a government on the mandate that President Rumen Radev will hand to the largest group in Parliament, GERB-UDF, on May 15.