site.btaMedia Review: July 3

POLITICS

24 Chasa sent a questionnaire with three questions to each of the seven parliamentary parties. The questions were: 1. Considering the status quo, what do Bulgarians expect from politicians? 2. Which of the following scenarios is most acceptable to your party: a government formed with GERB's mandate, snap elections in September, a government with a mandate given to another party/coalition or none of the above? 3. What are the three biggest problems that Bulgarians face today? While none of the parties had responded to 24 Chasa by Tuesday, the daily published the same poll on its website. By Tuesday night, just over 1,000 people had completed it. Nearly two in three respondents or 64% call for parties to suppress their ego and facilitate the forming of a cabinet. A similar number of respondents, 66% were in favour of supporting GERB-UDF's minority cabinet. A third of that, 22% were in favour of new snap elections, while the scenarios "programmatic government of experts" and "having a different party govern" were even less popular with 12% and 6% of the respondents voting for them respectively.

The six biggest problems indicated by the respondents were income and prices (33%), corruption (25%), Bulgaria's eurozone membership (12%), the possibility of having the war in Ukraine escalate (11%), the demographic crisis here (10%) and Bulgaria's potential full Schengen membership (7%).

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Telegraph quotes former deputy chairperson of Coalition for Bulgaria, Mihail Mikov, who in an interview for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) said that having GERB's proposed cabinet being backed in Parliament is a likely outcome, as most MPs in the current 50th Parliament tend to lean to the right. Mikov added that none of the political entities in this Parliament is ready for or willing to take part in new snap elections in the autumn.

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In an interview for Nova TV's morning talk show, mathematician and former deputy chair of the Central Election Commission, Prof. Mihail Konstantinov, said: "The whole world is in a confused state, as if everything is falling apart all at once. Bulgaria is no exception." Konstantinov said that the rift in the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) is severe. The importance of the party is stronger now than years ago because of the state of the world. Political scientist called the rift in the MRF a new horizon and a "wind of change that has been blowing in the West and came to Bulgaria as well".

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Duma criticizes Dimitar Glavchev's caretaker cabinet for trying to take credit for increasing pensions by 11%. The funds for the increase were set in this year's budget legislation passed by the previous cabinet.

The caretaker cabinet also took credit for the first successful HEMS missions to provide emergency medical assistance by air, even though this project was prepared months before the caretaker ministers took their oaths of office.

Finally, the article says that while Glavchev's cabinet boasted for organizing fair and transparent general and European Parliament elections on June 9, it failed to take into account reports from the Central Election Commission that hundreds of voting machines malfunctioned on the day of the elections, while hundreds of preferential votes could not be counted.

ECONOMY

Duma quotes a BNR interview with head of the Future for Tourism Association, Pavlina Ilieva, who said that Bulgarian tourists' leading factor when it comes to choosing their holiday destination is the price. Many Bulgarians choose the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, while the most popular destinations abroad are Turkiye in May and June and Greece in July and August.

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Trud's front page warns that companies swindle online users out of millions by selling them fake nutritional supplements. The companies employ questionable marketing tricks such as using experts and celebrities' photos and videos, sometimes doctored, to seem as if those people have endorsed the products. The owners of the websites that sell those products are unreachable, while the products labels would give contact details for the distributor and not the producer. The labels would also give a PO box rather than an actual address. The article specifies that supplements sold like that on the internet can often be harmful to the consumers' health.

According to data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Food, the nutritional supplements market grows by 10 to 15% annually.

ENVIRONMENT

In a spread interview for Trud, economy expert Prof. Boyan Durankev commented on the European Green Deal, saying: "Clearly, we have a global problem: global warming (or 'climate change'), which is the first undeniable fact. The question is not whether we like it or not, but whether humanity will follow the fate of the dinosaurs, and as soon as this century too. The second fact is that there is no effectively workable global agreement on a green deal. Private profits and national interests have crowded out public needs. The third fact is that the over-ambitious European Green Deal envisaged making Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. Let me reiterate the key targets: to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels; to make all new cars zero emission by 2035; to source 32% of energy from renewable sources by 2030, and so on. Well, we all saw how many EU Member States, including Bulgaria, started trying to 'renegotiate', delay, not absorb funds (some of them deliberately!), using as excuses the war in Ukraine and 'unforeseen circumstances', among others. But after the EU elections, most likely next year, there will be an even tougher Green Deal. We wouldn't want Amsterdam to sink or have southern Bulgaria turn into a part of the Sahara, would we? In corrupt countries such as Bulgaria, the Green Deal has turned a few hundred green entrepreneurs into multimillionaires, made some lobbyists rich from obsolete technologies, and in the meantime, corruption continues to run rampant in the form of 'absorbing nature'. [...] Bulgaria needs a qualitatively different Green Deal. Those sitting in the front row of the National Assembly are hardly interested in such a change. In fact, real change will be forthcoming when some of the front row in the National Assembly and the Council of Ministers start to inhabit the front row in correctional facilities."

EDUCATION

24 Chasa's front page is dedicated to the choice that many parents in Bulgaria make, to have their children take private lessons in addition to their regular classes, sometimes as early as kindergarten. The article reports that a single 90-minute lesson in Sofia tends to cost between BGN 30 and 50. Parents who send their children to private lessons see the experience as a financial problem but also as a stressful experience. One mother told the daily: "You do not actually have much of a choice. If you do not do it, you feel guilty, because you have not done everything you could to give your kid a chance. Something that I find extremely flawed because we live in a country with free education [...] The education system should be preparing children for external assessments, the original purpose of which was not to become such a stress and competition for schools, but rather to see the level of preparation of students in Bulgaria."

On the other hand, Chair of the Reading Foundation Valentina Stoeva said that taking private lessons or even attending a so-called prestigious school does not guarantee that the student will turn into a qualified worker or employee. The article concludes that private lessons are not a flaw of the educational system as much as they are the result of Bulgarians being used to pay for everything.

CHURCH

In an op-ed entitled "The Church between Politics and Faith" and published by Trud, Victoria Georgieva writes about the recent developments with the Bulgarian Orthodox Church that led to the election of its current head, Patriarch Daniil. Georgieva writes: "Even the drama surrounding the latest in a long series of elections and the possible next government failed to quell the passions around the election of a new Bulgarian patriarch. Even before his name was announced, the debates were marked by the formation of two camps, which were extremely similar to those formed around the war in Ukraine, thus leaving purely ecclesiastical matters and problems in the background, unlike the political ones, which suddenly became a part the election of Bulgaria's new spiritual leader.

"The schism in the Orthodox Church began in 2019 when Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew signed a tomos [a decree of the head of a particular Eastern Orthodox church on certain matters], a document declaring the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. With this document, he also formalized independence from the Russian Orthodox Church, to which it had been affiliated since 1686. And currently, some of the national churches do not recognize the tomos declaring the church in Ukraine as autocephalous. [...]

"Inevitably, what happened then further divided our own already not particularly united clergy. Once again, the dispute over the purely canonical was displaced at the expense of political bias. If you do not recognize the Ukrainian Church, then you are a Putinophile. The inappropriate statements of Russian Patriarch Kirill, just days after the Russian army invaded Ukraine, that this was happening to protect the people of Donbass who did not want to accept Western values and the "gay parades" undoubtedly contributed to the even more categorical positions of both Bartholomew and a number of other churches that have subsequently recognized the independence of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. [...]

"Over the years, especially after 1945, when the totalitarian Russian state decided, instead of destroying the church, to subjugate it and use it for its own purposes, including foreign policy, Bulgaria was one of the countries where serious structures were created by clergy close to Russia, who often defended not the national but the Russian interests. A significant number of Bulgarian metropolitans are graduates of the spiritual academies in the former Soviet Union, and today they are quite close to Russia and its vision - both on ecclesiastical and purely political matters."

The article states that two camps operate in the Bulgarian church: one Russophile trying to promote the interests of the Russian Orthodox Church and State, the other Greekophile, promoting the interests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Georgieva concludes: "We should also remember that politics and religion are extremely different, even though people mix them up, do not understand true faith and try to model it after their political biases. Moreover, what seems to us to be categorically right in a universal human sense, in a moral sense even, does not necessarily conform to the canons of the Church."

Duma published their own op-ed written by Kameliya Bazova, which seems to be a lot more flattering to Patriarch Daniil. The article's opening paragraph reads: "We are witnessing a Euro-Atlantic hysteria over the election of the new young [aged 52] Bulgarian Patriarch Daniil. Immediately after his enthronement, smear campaigns against him were launched, calling him 'Putin's agent', 'a weapon of the hybrid Russian attack against Bulgaria' and other nonsense, which only confirm the hysterical politicization of the Church by the Euro-Atlantics."

The op-ed states that Daniil is worthy of being the patriarch, as he is "in favour of the independence of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and its non-interference in Euro-Atlantic orchestrated schisms, such as the one in Ukraine". Bazova proceeds to blame the war in Ukraine on the US-organized Colour revolution in Kyiv, which she says took place in 2014. She warns that Europe's situation will worsen, if it persists with its "Russophobic hysteria, with the boomerang effect of anti-Russian sanctions and with its role as a Trojan American horse".

Both op-eds in Duma and Trud seem to agree that politicians should not meddle in religion and use it as a tool in their goals.