site.btaMedia Review: October 9

The ongoing election campaign dominates Wednesday's news media.

POLITICS

In an interview for Trud, political expert Stoycho Stoychev comments on the election campaign for the October 27 snap parliamentary elections. According to him, there is apathy among voters and MP candidates alike. When the candidates themselves lack motivation to conduct an interesting campaign and there is no public tension like back in 2021, the present campaign – the seventh in three years - cannot possibly be any different than the previous ones. He believes GERB and Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria are holding some kind of talks, because their campaign is positive and not full of attacks against each other. However, they will need a third and perhaps fourth participant to form a majority in the 51st National Assembly.  Who those additional participants will be is the big question.

Segabg.com quotes political expert Dimitar Ganev from the Trend polling agency as commenting that compared to the last 25 years, the type of messianism Bulgarian voters practiced at the beginning of the century seems to be receding and the voters are not willing to give power to one person, trusting that they will solve all problems. However, it is still too early to talk about a change in Bulgarians’ political culture after all the parliamentary elections in recent years. ''The formations which ran for messiah, such as There Is Such a People (TISP) and Continue the Change (CC) in 2021, are far from the results of NDSV and GERB in 2001-2009 (1,700,000 voters).  In July and November 2021, respectively, TISP and CC had between 6,000 and 700,000 votes, he recalled. He added that if there is a question of change, it is needed rather in the coalition culture of individual parties.  Although opinion polls predict a pretty good result for Vazrazhdane, according to Ganev it is exaggerated to talk about a growth in support for the nationalists, because there is almost no electoral periphery anymore. The trend of declining voter turnout also continues. "The problem within this political crisis and this series of elections we are in, is related to the lack of an alternative and the fact that the parties that are part of the parliamentary status quo suffer from a chronic lack of trust. Realistically, if you look at the turnout, this is the lowest turnout, and the one that is coming will be even lower,” the expert commented.

On Bulgarian National Television’s morning show, Stefan Manov, Deputy Chair of the Central Election Commission’s (CEC) Public Council, said that there is decreasing interest in elections among Bulgarians abroad. Those who applied to vote outside of Bulgaria in the October 27 elections are by 20% fewer than in the June elections. A lower voter turnout is expected among expats, he noted, adding that the Bulgarian political forces are doing what is necessary to increase that interest.

On Bulgarian National Radio, Iva Lazarova of the Institute for Public Environment Development and the CEC’s Public Council, said that parties invested around BGN 500,000 in media ads in the first ten days of the election campaign. Half of this sum went to Eurocom TV. "Around BGN 550,000 have been invested so far by 17 formations that have signed contracts with 39 media outlets monitored by us. Most of the funds were attracted by Eurocom TV. And in this campaign the TV attracts the most diverse formations from across the political spectrum. This has happened in previous campaigns. It also provides so-called grant contracts with some of the political parties. What is behind them, what kind of service - it cannot be clear from the information published in this way," she explained. "In the last 4 years, BGN 4.2 million have been distributed from media packages, with the biggest part of it going to Eurocom. And now most of the parties that advertise there also have funds from media packages. For this campaign, they are about BGN 780,000, according to the CEC decision." According to her, the candidates do not use funds from their media packages but the free forms. They debate issues not only from the political views of the candidates but also through their secular feelings, religious beliefs etc. In her view, through these debates we see how the parties have given up on their main function of governing. There are more quarrels between them, they have no programmes, noted Lazarova. "We are the country with 127 parties that submit financial reports to the Bulgarian National Audit Office every year, and most of them do not even have websites where we can find out about their programmes," she noted.

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Duma’s Wednesday issue is focused on the election campaign of BSP-United Left, with articles presenting the position of the coalition’s MP candidates across the country.

bTV’s morning show invited to an election debate representatives of the seven formations with the greatest chance to enter the 51st National Assembly, according to the latest opinion polls. However, only four of them accepted: GERB-UDF (represented by Delyan Dobrev), Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria (Assen Vassilev), BSP-United Left (Valeri Zhablyanov), and Vazrazhdane (Tsoncho Ganev). The formations which declined the invitation to the very-first election debate on bTV are MRF-New Beginning, Alliance for Rights and Freedoms, and There Is Such a People. The debate had two rounds: in the first, the participants took questions by bTV and held an open discussion on the priorities in their election and governance programmes; in the second round, the opponents asked each other questions. At the end, they had 30 seconds each for a message to the voters.

ECONOMY

24 Chasa’s front-page story reads that Bulgarian pensioners are no longer the poorest in the EU. Following minimum pension rises in the last years, a Bulgarian pensioner now gets EUR 297,73, compared to just EUR 74 in Hungary. Bulgaria is ahead of Czechia and Romania as well. 

Trud’s front-page article reads that Bulgarian pensioners should expect a very difficult winter due to heating costs. Despite the prices for central heating in the country being lower this year compared to 2023 thanks to the drastic depreciation of natural gas, it will cost just over BGN 350 to heat a dwelling of 80 sq m in Sofia this winter, the daily’s estimates show. At the same time, the minimum pension is BGN 580. If a pensioner with a minimum pension lives alone and keeps a whole flat warm, they will have only BGN 230 a month for food, utility bills, medicinal products and so on. According to data of the National Statistical Institute, one in five households in Bulgaria do not have the financial means to maintain a normal temperature at home; for pensioners, that share is much bigger.

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Nova TV’s morning show presented data showing that 380,000 children in Bulgaria live at risk of poverty or social exclusion, meaning that one in three children lacks the necessary standard of living. Despite that number being lower than ten years ago, Bulgaria remains among the European countries with the highest share of children at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Such children live in a household that suffers from serious material or social deprivations, for example inability of the household to pay rent or heating bills and to go on holiday.

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Bulgarian National Television’s morning show reported that there is a new trend among residents of Blagoevgrad (Southwestern Bulgaria) and the region to purchase dwellings in neighbouring Greece. That interest has resulted in a price rise in Greece. At the same time, the prices of real estate in Southwestern Bulgaria continue to be among the highest in the country. Despite the constant construction of residential buildings, the demand remains high and the prices reach up to EUR 2,000 per sq m, real estate agents say.  

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Mediapool.bg writes that a check the e-zine has conducted in the public module of the EU funds system in Bulgaria, ISUN 2020, shows Bulgaria has not negotiated with the European Commission a single road project under the Transport Connectivity Programme 2021-2027, although half of the programming period has passed. The budget of the programme is BGN 3.7 billion, while the actual amount disbursed so far is only about BGN 147 million, which is less than 4%. So far, 13 contracts have been signed for more than BGN 2.2 billion, according to the check in the ISUN. According to Deputy Transport Minister Dimitar Nedyalkov, as quoted by his Ministry, twelve projects worth BGN 1.16 billion have been approved under the Transport Connectivity Programme in the 2021-2027 programming period. The funds for road infrastructure with a budget of BGN 1.37 billion and for intermodality in urban conditions for BGN 92 million are zero, the e-zine writes. The best performance has been recorded for railway projects, where nearly 73% of the funds have been contracted. The reason is the massive completion of the projects from the past programming period (2014-2020), after Bulgaria failed to complete any of them in ten years.

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On Bulgarian National Television’s morning show, former caretaker deputy prime minister Atanas Pekanov commented that without reforms, Bulgaria will not receive the funds under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. In his words, the EU institutions’ patience towards Bulgaria has long been exhausted, and a large part of the money under the Plan will bel lost, if it has not been already.  “Because Bulgaria decides that it does not want to make reforms. It wants to be given the money but without doing anything. A position is being circulated that sounds attractive and rational and is being used by some parties. They say that this money is ours and we should not be given conditions. That may be true, but in the case of the Recovery and Resilience Facility this is a common commitment that Europe made in 2020,” Pekanov explained.

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Telegraf has an interview with Dr. Lyuboslav Kostov, chief economist at the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria, who talks about the tax laws in Bulgaria. According to him, it is time to reform the country’s tax system.

HOME AFFAIRS

Capital.bg has an interview with Prof Heinrich Badura, an Austrian observer and lecturer with research in EU integration, who talks about the political situation in Austria and the chance of Vienna lifting the veto on Bulgaria’s and Romania’s entry in the Schengen area. “From a purely theoretical and constitutional point of view, the current transitional government can lift the veto. In practice, however, I see almost no chance of that happening. Because, as I have said on other occasions to the Bulgarian public, the government coalition that has been in power so far has not, for ideological and party-political reasons, been prepared to say a clear and unequivocal 'yes' to the full membership of the two countries in the Schengen Agreement.” In his opinion, the majority who voted FPÖ [which won the parliamentary elections in Austria] support that party mostly because of its firm position against foreigners. These voters do not distinguish much between migrants from Bulgaria, Romania, Syria or Ukraine. All of those people fall under the category ‘foreigners in Austria’, whom the majority in question is against. If Brussels truly intends to put pressure on Vienna to lift the veto, action must be taken now, in the period of the interim government. The veto could be lifted once the regular government takes office but only if the FPÖ is not part of it. Should that party succeed in forming a government of its own or at least, be a coalition partner in the new cabinet, Vienna will not allow Brussels to determine what Austria should do with the migration issue, Prof Badura commented.

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24 Chasa has an interview with Vladimir Todorov, head of the Bulgarian Association of Road Accident Victims, who talks about road safety. He says that some 70% of Bulgarians do not wear a seatbelt when travelling on the back seat of a car. If an accident happens at a speed of 50 km/h, the hit that a passenger sustains is like a fall from the fifth floor of a building, he warned.