site.btaMedia Review: February 11

POLITICS

Trud has interviewed political psychologist Antoaneta Hristova, who talks about the government's prospects of stability, Bulgaria's possible entry in the Eurozone, the ideological background of the parliamentary forces and the need of legislation on control of foreign financing. Prof Hristova says the government's stability hinges on GERB (on whose mandate it was formed), and on how the process of joining the eurozone pans out. She assumes that in a sense, GERB leader Boyko Borissov is against the adoption of the euro because a large swathe of his supporters are opposed to it and there may be elections in the near future. Borissov has an interest in identifying hurdles on the way to the eurozone, such as a large budget deficit. He seems to be paving the way for GERB's quitting the government as the party can hardly reverse attitudes now that it has gained votes in the older age groups which fear the euro. The government's stability also largely depends on the election (or not) of acting Prosecutor General Borislav Sarafov; if he is elected mid-year, there will be grounds for stability from then on. The budget is another key factor: if it offers enough leeway, the Bulgarian Socialist Party will be happy and GERB will loosen the purse strings for the next elections.

Hristova calls the actions of Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) in Parliament "completely misguided", referring to the discussion on the rules for electing members of the Supreme Judicial Council and regulatory bodies. The expert said that "everyone basically embraced the idea of having no control or rules". CC-DB have been claiming they are ready to support anything as long as the euro is adopted. What works for them is that former finance minister Assen Vassilev has demonstrated that wages can be raised and people are happy about that. However, the fact that CC-DB have become too collaborative is a major downside - their role now should be to act as an opposition.

The expert argues for the need of legislation on control of foreign financing: "When we talk about national security, it is essential for Bulgaria to have control over money coming from abroad. This control must be strictly regulated to avoid a negative impact on other international relations. Similar regulations exist both in the US and Russia. Supporters of America claim that the Foreign Agents Bill proposed by Vazrazhdane is modelled on a Russian law. Vazrazhdane counters that the US also has such legislation. In fact, all countries that respect their sovereignty have such laws. Only Bulgaria is open to all kinds of foreign influence. (…) Anyone who does not take the need of such legislation seriously is neither a true advocate for media freedom nor genuinely concerned about national security."

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Interviewed by bTV, Mihail Mikov, former chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), said participation in the government coalition was an attempt to revitalize the party but the outcome would not be impressive. The National Council decided that BSP should form a coalition with GERB after years of invoking a decision of the party's congress which ruled this out. Rosen Zhelyazkov heads a political, not an expert government, and any claims to the contrary are intended to make voters forget the election promises.

BSP acting Chairman Atanas Zafirov told the Bulgarian National Television (BNT) that Zhelyazkov is fulfilling his duties as prime minister strictly and efficiently. Zafirov expects all nationally responsible parliamentary forces to back the 2025 budget.

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Commenting on a drone intrusion in Sofia Airport on February 7 and the government's recognition of the urgent need for anti-drone systems, Border Police Director Anton Zlatanov said they are needed in all strategic sites and facilities, including the borders and the Kozloduy nuclear power plant. He said the Bulgarian-Turkish border is a case point as criminals trying to smuggle migrants and drug traffickers launch drones to check where the border patrols are and choose the most convenient locations for their criminal activities.

FINANCE

Morality, Unity, Honour (MECh) leader Radostin Vasilev said in a BNT interview that he did not expect the government to discuss policies during the adoption of the new budget. Normalcy ended many years ago when Boyko Borissov was elected prime minister, said Vasilev. With [GERB member] Temenuzhka Petkova as finance minister, he does not expect a budget that would change the public finance concept significantly. All she is doing is blame everything on CC-DB's finance minister Assen Vassilev, who "unlike her, is not incompetent". All the talk about a huge deficit is a way to dodge responsibility for the 2025 budget, according to the MECh leader.

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The Bulgarian National Radio interviewed journalists Stefan Antonov and Tanya Petrova about the budget and its possible use by politicians as an alibi for a failure to join the eurozone. When the draft budget is released, "we will see if it is realistic or if it is a story that the authorities will try to sell to the European C omission and the European Central Bank to avoid being accused of failing with the fiscal indicator and focusing on inflation", said Antonov. He added that it defies imagination how the government will meet all the promises to increase spending on salaries and pensions, not raise taxes, and still have a 3% budget deficit." Petrova also expects that there will be a problem with the deficit on an accrual basis for 2024, which will be used as an excuse to say that the 2025 budget meets the 3% deficit requirement, but that things were bad in 2024, under other governments.

Antonov said that according to the accounting standard applied by the EC and ECB, the expected deficit will be 3.4% or 3.8%. Unless political considerations and agreements come into play, Bulgaria cannot meet the criteria for joining the eurozone in 2026. He said Croatia met the inflation criterion for four years and then started deviating from it, while Bulgaria has never met this criterion since 2018. According to him, finances have been poorly managed in the last four years. "We need to take care of Bulgaria and public finances. The eurozone can do without us. We can do without the Eurozone," he said, adding that Bulgaria has taken out BGN 27 billion in new loans since it entered the eurozone waiting room.

For her part, Petrova said that the government seems to be preparing the public for failure: it will request a convergence report, but will not get the green light for the eurozone. All politicians who contributed to the destabilization of public finances have an interest in this. Right now, Bulgaria is reaping the consequences of poorly managed public finances over the past few years, and criticisms of Assen Vassilev are justified, she added.

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The Democracy, Rights, and Freedoms (DRF) parliamentary group Monday strongly disagreed with the appointment of Lyudmila Petkova as Director of the Public Financial Inspection Agency. According to DRF, the decision was not discussed within the framework of the Joint Governance Council. Petkova was finance minister of the caretaker cabinet and briefly a deputy finance minister of the present regular government.

FOOD

Trud says the boycott of all grocery stores in Bulgaria on February 13 may be just the beginning, according to the organizers, ten NGOs which called on Bulgarians to refrain from shopping in protest at high food prices. "The prices of butter, milk, cheese, meat and sausage in foreign-owned retail chains are higher in their Bulgarian branches than in their home countries, where the standard of living is much higher," the organizers said in their address to the public. They asked why the same product, in the same retail chain, costs more in Bulgaria than in Austria and Germany.

In a media release, Delyan Peevski, leader of the MRF-New Beginning, Tuesday said he would ask the Commission for Protection of Competition and the Commission for Consumer Protection to act promptly and identify the reasons for the sharp rise in the prices of staple foods. Peevski wants to know if price hikes are due to profiteering, unfair trading practices or cartel agreements.

Former agriculture minister Kiril Vatev told Nova TV that over 800,000 family-owned stores in Bulgaria had closed down in the last 20 years. A producer who does not work with retail chains will inevitably go bankrupt. In Vatev's view, boycotting the big retail chains will not solve the price problem. In Bulgaria, those chains do not operate under the rules that apply in their home countries. For instance, they could be closed on weekends, or the closing time could be 8pm, thus giving smaller stores a chance.

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A story in Trud headlined "Brussels Approves Bread with Powdered Worms" says the European Commission has granted approval for France's Nutriearth to market yellow mealworm powder in the EU. This flour can be used in bread, cakes, pasta, processed potato products and cheese. The new regulation, effective from Monday, allows up to 4 grams of mealworm flour per 100 g of bread and 3.5 g per 100 g of pastries. In Bulgaria, there are four insect farms producing house crickets, giant mealworms, yellow mealworms and black soldier flies, according to Anatoli Tsenov, co-chair of the Association of Insect Producers in Bulgaria The EU limits insect-based flour to a maximum of 10% in food products. Nutrition expert Donka Baykova warns of potential health risks, including psoriasis and Hashimoto's disease. She highlights concerns over chitin, which could hinder protein absorption, and the possibility of pesticide contamination in insects' diets. Also, Europeans lack the specific enzymes of populations in Asia, Latin America and Africa that have consumed insects for centuries. She is sceptical that European consumers will accept insect-based foods easily.

SOCIETY

24chasa.bg has a forecast by Sofiaplan, a municipal company responsible for spatial and strategic planning in Sofia Municipality. The two main trends identified in the forecast are slower construction pace, as the city's population is expected to grow by just 11,800 people by 2050; and a decrease in migration from neighbouring municipalities in the next 25 years. The mechanical increase is projected at about 89,000 people due to the limited migration capacity of surrounding areas. Still, there will still be significant investment pressure, driven by an growing middle class.

The population in central Sofia will shrink by 4.6%, while in other residential areas the decrease will be around 0.94%. Sofia's population is expected to age significantly - children under 2 years old will increase by 0.02% every 10 years, while the working-age population (19-64 years) will decline by 5.57% every 10 years. The number of retirees will grow in line with national and European trends, increasing by about 3.98% in 25 years. By 2050, around 104,000 new homes are expected to be completed.

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Mediapool.bg (on Monday evening) and 24chasa.bg have a story about Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, who featured in an awareness campaign launched by the caretaker government of Dimitar Glavchev in December 2024 under the motto "You Don't Need an Oscar to Get a US Visa". The campaign aimed to educate the public about various types of US visas, with the ultimate goal of bringing B visa refusal rates below 3%. Critics accused Foreign Minister Georg Georgiev of choosing Bakalova as the face of the campaign for inclusion in the US Visa Waiver Program, noting that she had starred in two films that were not flattering to President Donald Trump. Bakalova won an Oscar nomination in 2021 for her role in Borat Subsequent Movie Film and plays Trump's ex-wife Ivana in The Apprentice. Last October, Trump lashed out at the film, calling it "a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election".

24chasa.bg says it was producers Andrey Arnaudov and Ivan Hristov who won the competition and selected the actress as the campaign's spokesface. Bakalova said in a media statement that actors should not publicly express political bias and that she has never done so. She said, however, that she believes a public figure should be responsible to society, and if there is an opportunity to help her homeland or fellow citizens, she should do so.

Mediapool.bg carries an opinion by Deutsche Welle editor Alexander Detev, who calls ending the campaign with Bakalova is scandalous for several reasons. First, taxpayer money has been spent on it and the campaign should be completed. Second, the country clearly operates according to a well-known, corrupt scheme - Boyko Borissov comes up with an idea, and everyone complies. (The author was referring to Borissov's suggestion that Sylvester Stallone be featured in the campaign, as he was very impressed by the internet in Bulgaria - and Stallone is one of the few popular Hollywood actors supporting President Trump.) Third, it is entirely unacceptable for the young Bulgarian actress to be "sacrificed" to please the current political situation in the US. Moreover, this is done preemptively, as there has been no public information about any reaction from Washington. The new US administration is seeking to change radically not just the United States but the entire international order. America is clearly no longer supporting its partners, at least not in the way that Europe has been accustomed to for decades, Detev says.

MEDIA

In the context of President Trump's intention to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, Trud publishes a commentary by Viktor Blaskov who takes issue with a statement by factcheck.bg. The website said that "in the past four years, there is no record of a Bulgarian media outlet receiving funds from USAID". Blaskov cites a WikiLeaks report claiming that USAID transferred about USD 467 million to Internews, an organization collaborating with the Association of European Journalists, which consists mainly of employees of Bulgaria's Dnevnik, Capital, OFFnews, and Mediapool. Coincidentally, the AEJ also owns factcheck.bg. Blaskov says USAID's funding for Bulgaria in 2023 includes some USD 1 million to Global Engagement Center (GEC). GEC awarded a grant to a British NGO which creates rankings of media outlets based on their level of disinformation, "somehow always labelling conservative media as high-risk". GEC does not have an office in Bulgaria, distributes grants, and has a budget of over USD 1 million specifically for this country. Blaskov says that while it is correct to say that there is no document directly proving a specific USAID grant to a Bulgarian media outlet, there are ample data on funding linked to the network of Economedia, Mediapool, OFFnews and their affiliates. It turns out that organizations funded by the US State Department create a censorship network, where a British website decides who is "disobedient," and then Internews persuades advertisers to avoid them.