site.btaMedia Review: April 2

POLITICS

In an interview with the Bulgarian National Radio, Ciela Norma CEO Vesselin Todorov said that if the upcoming early national and European elections are not held on the same day, they should be held two weeks apart. Ciela Norma is the company which is in charge of the voting machines for Bulgaria's elections. "We have always asked for elections to be set two weeks apart, but no one listens. We understand that the public wants things to happen faster. We will manage, but it will be stressful", he said, commenting on the uploading of the new ballots between Monday and Friday for the second elections. According to Todorov one option is for the elections to be held on June 9 and 23. Most parties in Parliament are in favour of two-in-one elections but the President has said that it may be too late for that because of the procedure in the run-up to the snap elections.

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On Nova Television's morning show, political analyst Daniel Smilov said he was not worried that a possible constitutional crisis could break out in Bulgaria. He stressed that even if the President had failed to find a suitable future caretaker prime minister, the Council of Ministers would have continued to perform its functions until a new one was elected. "Bulgaria would have had a legislature and a parliament," he noted.

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24 Chasa features an extensive interview with former deputy agriculture minister and deputy prime minister for European funds Meglena Plugchieva. She argued that incompetence, combined with a pathological thirst for power, plunged Bulgaria into the worst political crisis in 30 years. Plugchieva described outgoing Finance Minister Assen Vassilev's idea to turn state forestry holdings into one-person joint stock companies as "dangerous": This could turn 80% of forests into private property", she said.

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In an interview with Telegraph, Vazrazhdane MP Daniel Petrov said that municipal councils are massively altering forest land to give it to investors who build forests of photovoltaics. "Our next step will be to make changes to the law so we can make this process more difficult," he added.

ECONOMY

Mediapool features an article on "the dangerous network of Russian gas flows in Bulgaria". The media outlet writes that last month, a roadmap for the Turkish/Balkan Stream gas pipeline, carefully concealed by [GERB leader] Boyko Borissov and [GERB MP and former energy minister] Temenuzhka Petkova, surprisingly emerged. The leaked files from the hacked emails of a Russian politician confirmed suspicions that the project was being implemented entirely at the dictation of the Kremlin to serve Russia's strategic plans to bypass Ukraine, the article states. Borissov's compromising roadmap emerged at a critical moment when Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) set conditions for him to continue reforms in the judiciary and regulators that limit the "exclusivity" of the Movement for Rights in Freedoms in them. Rumours emerged that the leak was controlled by Moscow as a warning to Borissov not to accept the CC-DB’s demands, otherwise more documents compromising him could be leaked, Mediapool notes. The article adds that not only GERB, but also CC-DB should give clear answers why the State is sabotaging its own official policy of limiting and terminating Russian gas supplies at the expense of alternative sources. In the third year of the Russian war in Ukraine, Bulgaria is being crossed by Russian gas flows, the media outlet writes. The Denkov cabinet imposed a levy on Gazprom's transit to Europe, but cancelled it in the name of Schengen after strong reactions from Hungary and Austria. Last spring, GERB waved invoices against CC-DB for the imported Russian gas in Bulgaria, in parallel attacking Bulgargaz. In the months that followed, however, they fell silent, although imports continued,” Mediapool points out. The article quotes the National Customs Agency as saying that imports of Russian gas for the domestic Bulgarian market last year were made by four companies. It says that the transit of Russian gas via Turkish Stream through Bulgaria to Serbia, Greece and North Macedonia continues, and some of the volumes going in the Greece-Romania direction are also Russian. "This whole tangle of gas flows, a significant part of which carry and import raw material from Russia, shows that Bulgaria is undermining its own official policy of refusing Russian energy raw materials, as well as the EU's efforts not to sponsor the war in Ukraine by buying Russian gas," the article underlines.

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In an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR), Yordan Arabadzhiev, Executive Director of the Union of International Haulers, said that Bulgaria’s accession to the Schengen area by air and sea only is a major blow to the Bulgarian economy. He noted that about 95% of Bulgarian imports and exports are on land. Arabadzhiev said that according to statistics Bulgaria loses about BGN 5 billion due to waiting at border crossings. He said that the hardest blow for Bulgarian consumers would be the rising price of goods because of the long waits at the land borders. The cost of transport is up by 15-17% and this is passed on to the final price of goods, he argued. Arabadzhiev also pointed to record long border waits of over 90 hours at the Kapitan Andreevo checkpoint, which he described as absurd. According to him, if the wait at the Danube Bridge is then added to this, the course of a haulier is extended by several days. "The easiest thing to do is a protest. It is much harder to achieve a result. A protest should be a last resort," he said.

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Trud quotes National Social Security Institute data, according to which more and more people are retiring with insufficient years of service. As a result, despite annual increases in the required years of service and age to receive a pension, the average number of years people work before retirement is declining. In 2023, the total number of retired people receiving a state pension was 100,213, an increase of 2,623 (+2.7%) from the previous year. The number of people receiving a retirement pension granted with insufficient years of service but on reaching the age of 67 in 2023 was 13,247, up 10% on the previous year. 

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Trud reports a drastic rise in the price of used cars in the country. Buyers are paying over 40% more when buying used cars, the daily notes. Experts say the pandemic, during which the auto industry was severely slowed, is still to blame for the upward trend. "New car prices have risen sharply, so households in Western Europe who are used to having everything on credit or lease are unable to pay double or triple the price of a car. Hence the rise in new car prices has pushed up the price of second-hand cars," Association of Car Importers in Bulgaria Deputy Chair Lubomir Dorosiev said. According to traffic police data, more than 266,000 cars were registered in 2022, as 220,304 of them were used vehicles. In 2023, there was an increase in registered cars - over 295,000 vehicles, of which nearly 239,000 used.

HEAT WAVE

On bTV’s morning show, climatologist Georgi Rachev predicted that temperatures are about to normalize, but they will remain higher than typical for early April. Record high temperatures were reported across Bulgaria on Monday, exceeding 30C in some cases.

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On Bulgarian National Television's morning show, pulmonologist Sofia Angelova said that temperatures are unusually high, which creates stress for the human body. Along with that, the southerly breeze brought Saharan dust that increased the polluted air, she noted. She advised young people to limit outdoor physical exercise and chronically ill patients to avoid prolonged stays outside.