The first parliamentary election is approaching in which the Bulgarian voters are likely to cast a protest vote for the entire political system that has been totally discredited over the past 23 years. The lack of trust is evident. The leaders of parties such as GERB, the socialists, the new Bulgaria To Citizens, The Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Ataka opened their factories for illusions, which from time tio time turns out to be a very well paid activity. If one is to believe what they say, after four years Bulgaria will be a modern, technologically advanced country with fiscally sound budget, a rich country with a prosperous economy, with cheap electricity, new roads and highways. Surely election headquarters will achieve increasingly unattainable heights of verbosity until the polling day of May 12.
Actually they all are in a fierce fight for every vote and the
most attractive targets are clearly the mainstream voters, the ones with a low standard of living, insolvent and poor ones, the ones with few opportunities for work in the community. Accordingly, the five parties announced by sociologists as the favourites to win seats in the next parliament, once again played on the social strings of people’s hearts. All of them are eager to promise higher salaries and pensions, family care, tens of thousands of new jobs, but no one says how they are goint to find the billions of levs needed for this. The ex-ruling GERB was bragging that they would bring 32 billion levs from EU funds for the programming period between 2014 and 2020. This proposition sounds too scary, as the party of Boyko Borisov apparently believes they can run the country until at least 2020.
As for Mr. Borisov, he obviously is not even aware of the reason why his government was so early to be kicked out of power, and the very plausible explanation – his complete and unconditional surrender to apply adequate social and income policies. The high heating bills were only one reason for the protests in the street.
DSB leader Ivan Kostov appropriately noted that two-thirds of the programme of GERB is actually implementation of binding commitments to the European Union to absorb EU funds, and the rest are impossible undertakings tending to be too leftist.
With astonishment we now understand that GERB will fight unemployment through building more than 12,000 businesses in industry, information technologies, services and innovation. Bravo, this is probably accounting for a lot of new jobs, one million maybe? But how is any party to make this change is a complete mystery, since thanks to the systematic suffocation of SMEs the previous government of GERB lost over 270,000 jobs.
Too arrogant is also the fact that the social agenda of GERB now contains measures that former government of Borissov either abolished or strongly refused to accept because they were said to burden the budget. The party now declares that motherhood allowances would equal the minimum wage, but two months ago Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov confidently claimed that such a move would be an unnecessary expense. M most interestingly, Minister of Social Affairs Mladenov also opposed the increase because parents may drink off the money .
Unfortunately, the difference between reality and promises is not any closer in other parties’ programmes.
