"As always, political talk and the real situation are quite different". This is what Kiril Petkov from "Continuing the change" wrote on his Facebook profile.
Here is his entire post:
"Budget
It became clear to everyone that there is no 18 billion hole. Even Peevski's official cabinet presented a budget with a 3% deficit - which is 6 billion.
The new Minister of Finance, with PR orders to say how bad everything is, confused revenues and expenditures at the press conference in his statement about the January figures.
There are two real problems, however, for GERB with the budget. The first is that the salary increases of over 50% voted for by them (we were against these amounts) for the Ministry of Interior, DANS and DATO, must be found somewhere. The only thing GERB can do is reduce investments, which, however, makes it difficult to "return old services" to large construction companies and all other players, to support their mayors and to scatter funds among coalition partners to keep them loyal. I can only imagine what money "for investments" Grozdan Karadjov, for example, requested the Ministry of Transport.
Borisov's other problem is that in order to get the money from Europe under the Recovery and Resilience Plan, which is about 10 billion, he must adopt the anti-corruption legislation - he doesn't want it that much!
In this situation, Borisov can only try to get out through his favorite PR: to blow the alarm sirens of how scary it is, so that he can cut some of the people's social spending, so that he has money to give away to keep his coalition. Thus, we return to the period of "lean pizza" and throwing money from the jeep at "his people", "his mayors" and "coalition partners".
The fact that the last 4 budgets were below 3% deficit, that the last 4 balances for January were always in surplus - this information should be quickly forgotten because it does not work for GERB's PR. Magnitsky's financier, Goranov, should explain to us that it is difficult and ordinary people's belts will have to be tightened.
The Eurozone
It would have been very easy to make a serious budget deficit, to waste money on their companies and to blame Assen Vassilev for everything, but a large part of Bulgarians have expectations for the Eurozone, because we ALREADY meet all the real criteria. We all know that this difference of 0.1% does not matter, just as it did not matter in Croatia.
The second problem of GERB is that the BSP has a choice of a new leader, and the request for a convergence report before the BSP internal elections may harm the choice of leaders who are also ministers in the coalition.
The third problem is that the ITN does not want to rush into the Eurozone, because its voters are close to Vazrazhdane, and such a quick entry will make even their last voter go elsewhere. The only way to "calm" the ITN is to throw huge investments at Minister Karadzhov, but that's where we hit the 3% deficit restriction.
Since we all know that for Borisov, his own survival is more important than both the Eurozone and the state budget, he will consider until the last moment whether to postpone the Eurozone. In the first PP cabinet in 2022, I put the adoption of the plan for entering the Eurozone to a vote and the Council of Ministers split in the vote - 10 supported, 8 did not (ITN and BSP were against). We still succeeded. For better or worse, we have always put national ideas before party and personal ones, but this is not Boyko, whose survival is always the number one priority.
PP-DB
Our responsibility is to remove the PR fog of GERB and show people that the budget deficit is entirely possible to be below 3%. All businesses and all people who do not want us to be out of BRICS must loudly say that they want to enter the Eurozone from January 1, 2026.
We know very well that some of GERB's friends with large black coffers in levs will not want to come clean and let us enter the Eurozone, we also know that some of the gray banks will also pull back, we know that GERB's coalition partners will also want us to go back, we know that their friendly businesses and mayors will want their money above the 3% budget deficit. We cannot allow GERB to betray this national priority for the sake of Borisov's personal survival. It is a betrayal of Bulgaria for a party leader's personal interest to be above the national interest.
If Borisov thinks that he will again deceive pensioners, young families, teachers and doctors, he has not guessed. Through public pressure, together with business, trade unions, and the entire democratic community, we will join forces and say - GERB must take the step towards the Eurozone, without lying to the people with the lean pizza, without lying to the people that it cannot have a budget with a 3% deficit. This will be our role in the next few months.
Bulgaria can enter the Eurozone on January 1, 2026. It is up to all of us to prevent GERB from hindering this national priority!"