The leader of “We Continue the Change“ Assen Vassilev made a public presentation yesterday on the topic “HOW A POOR COUNTRY CAN BECOME RICH, DESPITE THE CRISIS“.
In front of a full hall “Azaryan“ at the National Palace of Culture, the former Finance Minister presented a vision of how our country can develop, have investments and a modern industry that can provide high incomes to its workers. How to have a functioning administration, transparent state spending and justice, so that those who steal – to be punished.
With world maps, graphs and a walk through old budgets from the time of Stambolov to the latest budgets, with which as Finance Minister he made the state's spending transparent, Assen Vassilev clearly explained to the audience the path that must be taken in order for our country to become a rich, normal European country. Which countries are rich according to the goods and services they produce and where we are on the world map according to our economic development.
THE WORLD ECONOMY AND THE THREE LEADING CENTERS
Assen Vassilev began by showing a map of the world based on which country produces how many goods and services and, in fact, how rich each country is. It clearly outlines three centers - the USA, the European Union and China. According to him, these three economic blocs account for between 65% and 79% of world production. Where is Bulgaria in this whole picture in terms of GDP per capita? - in 1990 we were almost out of the picture, but in the same year China was poorer than us. After a few years China advanced, we almost caught up with the Romanians, but compared to the European Union we are almost out of the map. After a few more years the Romanians have already passed us. Now we have caught up a little, but there is still a lot to catch up in terms of economic development, the former finance minister commented on the figures.
„Now they often say that Bulgaria should join the BRICS. These are the two richest countries in the BRICS - Russia and China. Both are poorer than Bulgaria. Not that it is a reason for pride, but it is a reason for reflection - do we want to be in the club where countries are richer than us and accordingly we catch up and become richer, or in the club where we are the richest country and others have to catch up in order to become as rich as us“, explained Asen Vassilev.
The leader of the PP pointed out that the question is how quickly Bulgaria catches up with the economic lag behind the countries in the EU. In 2006, before our entry into the EU, we and the Romanians were at 39% of the average European income level. “In 2011, at the end of the first global economic crisis, GERB carried out an extremely wrong financial and economic policy and then the Romanians overtook us. We were on a lean pizza for 3 years. In 2021, we are already at almost 60% of the average European level in this indicator“, explained Assen Vassilev. In 2025, we are already 2/3 of the average European income. Here too, we have caught up 10% in these 4 years. That is, we are catching up three times faster than in recent years.
THE FOUR MAJOR COMPONENTS OF PRODUCTION
For people who have studied macroeconomics, the production of all goods and services depends on four major components, the PP leader explained and pointed them out:
The first is education. How much a worker can produce, how trained he is. Here again, the leaders are Europe, China and the USA, Australia. We are doing quite well in Europe in terms of the level of university graduates. 85% of people between 25 and 64 in our country have either secondary or higher education. Average for Europe – 80%, in Spain – 65%, in Italy – 67%. So, in general, our education system has no problem with quantity. Whoever did not ask, did not graduate from university.
However, in terms of the quality of education, the 2022 PISA results show that we are much worse than the European average. “So what is constantly explained to us that we have low labor productivity cannot be explained by education. Every Bulgarian worker can get on a plane, go to Germany and suddenly defend a 2-3 times higher salary. And this is not because they were given knowledge on the plane during the two hours of the flight“, said Assen Vassilev.
The second is how much capital we have armed the worker with and how much investment there is in the country. The second indicator of how a country can become richer is to increase the capital available to each worker, what machines they work with, regardless of whether they are in a factory or a programmer. In Europe, each worker works with a machine park for about 20,000 dollars, in Bulgaria it is 14,000. That is, our workers are worse equipped than European workers.“
What is this due to? - in the cabinet “Borisov 1“ GERB decided not to apply the European directive on state aid to Bulgaria, according to which if a company wants to invest in new production facilities and machinery, the state has the right to support it with a grant based on the development of the region. For example, if a factory buys a machine for 100,000 euros, the state can give it 50,000 euros.
The Romanians applied this when they entered the European Union in 2007, and that's why all the factories went there. In Bulgaria, we applied the European directive for the first time in 2023, from which 4 large enterprises in Shumen, Plovdiv, Pleven and over 30 smaller companies expanded their production. This mechanism worked for a year and was stopped by the cabinets “Glavchev“ and “Zhelyazkov“. That is, lean pizza not only for citizens, lean pizza for investors too.
„Business must be helped so that these investments can happen. And when it is helped, it can now give higher salaries to Bulgarian citizens and workers. This was the reason why 1 million Bulgarians left Bulgaria for higher salaries. And this is the burden of being responsible for the country's economy, because one wrong decision directly confuses the lives of all people“, said Assen Vassilev.
The third is innovation and entrepreneurship
It all starts with an invention, usually a scientist invents something new. Then an entrepreneur appears. The entrepreneur takes something invented, sees in it an opportunity to make money. He finds someone to give him capital to risk it and market the new product. But there are usually some big companies on the market that are not very happy about a new product appearing on the market.
The moment this product proves to be successful and hits the market, imitators come. There are entire countries whose economies specialize in imitation, it's not just China, Japan before that. Imitation is the fastest way to catch up, because you take a ready-made model, you know it works, you imitate it with a cheaper or lower quality, or a cheaper way to do it, and the whole economy moves forward. And when everyone imitates your product, the whole thing ends and you return to the status quo.
If we want entrepreneurship to pull our economy forward like a locomotive, we must be ready for all big companies to not be able to block small companies. Unfortunately, we are not ready for this as a society yet. Europe is not ready. The European Union is made for big companies from the status quo“, explained Assen Vassilev.
According to him, we must be ready to say “we will be the deregulated market in Europe, we will not protect the big companies, we will bring these huge funds that have billion-dollar accounts and can stand behind a company so that it can break through the industry. We will lobby in Brussels against all the regulations that big companies are trying to push through and this is our national policy”.
The fourth component that is most crippling in Bulgaria, if we want to get rich, are the institutions – everything from the court to the lady at the counter who issues you some kind of permit or criminal record certificate.
And the problem with institutions is usually that they waste economic resources of citizens and companies. The point is to waste less economic resources, that is, to be more efficient. Citizens and companies should not spend three hours, but thirty minutes, to get a job done.
For illustration, Assen Vassilev also showed part of the budgets of Bulgaria, made in the first years after liberation. Documents from the time of Stambolov - 1894, for example, show that there were 9 ministries at that time. They show that a total of 20 people worked in the Ministry of Education, along with the minister and the secretary general, with salaries clearly listed for each position. The salaries of teachers and school principals are also fixed in the budget. “A review of these budgets shows history without embellishment and ideology”, said Assen Vassilev. He gave an example that the current budget of the Ministry of Defense, on one line for personnel expenses, 1.2 billion leva is recorded - there is no breakdown, it is not clear for how many people, it is not clear what salaries. And the minister can do whatever he wants within this billion and two hundred. It's not very effective either.
“It's no coincidence that the protests were about this, because they had staked 20 billion leva in debt with a 7 billion leva deficit. This is money that will disappear in the BDB, in the BEH and in various other coffers. They had staked raising taxes, that is, each of us would pay more for this.“, commented Vassilev.
„In the GERB years, a figure of several million leva was written in one column. And gifts were made from the jeep with a decision of the Council of Ministers. In 2021, this is about 2 billion leva. In 2022, we added a paragraph that says what this money is spent on - for the strategy for the scientific roadmap, for an increase in salaries at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, for the renovation of student dormitories, for school buses, etc. For the first time, we showed this money in detail. It is still given by decree of the Council of Ministers, but now the parliament says what to give it for. 2023 and 2024 in the same way, 2025 – this paragraph is no longer there.“, Asen Vassilev showed.
“In our budgets, for the first time, the Regional Ministry allocated 2 billion leva for roads – project by project, where and what will be built, and how much money it will cost. The Parliament voted exactly this money that the MRDPW declared. The question is how many of these roads were built and then paid for. Because we stopped the practice of advances. Boyko Borisov complained that there was not a spoonful of asphalt. But it is not because there is no money, because they cannot steal“, said the leader of the PP.
According to him, the last thing that completely blew them away was “when we made the program for the municipalities and instead of the mayors going to pray to the Prime Minister, we said that each municipality based on the population has the right to a budget and the mayor decides what projects to submit – for roads, for a street network, for water and sanitation, for whatever the mayor wants to do in his municipality – also written and approved by parliament project by project for the entire country. It should be clear what the money will go for.“
THE WAY FOR BULGARIA TO MOVE UP
„The way for Bulgaria to move up economically is to educate our people, to have our machinery renewed and to fix our institutions. Some of the institutions related to the court, the prosecutor's office, the Supreme Judicial Council must also be changed so that there is no theft. Because if there is theft, any entrepreneur will want to make their company and investment abroad so that they do not steal it“, summarized Asen Vassilev.
„The other part is related to having transparency of expenses. We did it for the PMCs, we did it for the capital program, but I couldn't do it and fight for the administration“, he admitted. To describe by the respective position, how many people in this position and how much money they will receive, so that it doesn't happen that the chief secretary receives twice as much as the minister. I guarantee that if we manage to push through this as transparency, the costs will decrease dramatically. First, salaries that are unreasonable will be removed, and at high positions, and it will be seen who does what work“, he was categorical.
According to him, the second way to increase efficiency is for the money to return to people and businesses - whether in the form of tax breaks, whether as lower taxes, or in the form of a ceiling on electricity prices, as happened in the great crisis. If the money is returned to the people as income, as pensions, there is no way it can be stolen.
REAL POLITICS
„By solving these problems, you are already starting to make real politics. You decide where we as a country should put our resources so that the economy moves forward, so that there is better income for citizens, so that there is a more competitive business with a better machine park, so that it can pay higher wages. And how to do it so that we do not waste business's time.
Each one of these things goes through the push of a button in parliament and 121 people who say „yes“ or „no“.
„This is the real conversation about Bulgaria as a normal European country, and not as an organized crime group that steals from us. If we go through ideology to solve the country's economic problems, then the chance of a catastrophe is huge and the price we will pay as a society is super high and we have paid this several times“, was categorical Assen Vassilev.
„And most importantly, we must be prepared and adequate to what is happening in the world. If we do not understand what is happening in the world economy and world politics, what migration processes are, the chance of not being able to protect our incomes and not being able to protect our businesses is very high“ he believes.
„And here the real question is, do we want to pull in incomes, economy and be able to make sound investments? For sound investments to be made - there is no way they can be made in the dark and there is no way they can be made if there is no real control and a real court for those who mess with the barrel. "And that's why our first point is not income, but our first point is a new Supreme Judicial Council and a new Prosecutor General. If we don't fix this, it will be a brake on the main things that need to happen in the Bulgarian economy for us to become richer," said the PP leader.
Assen Vassilev pointed out that the development of military power is also important. He showed what the map of the world looks like as a military power - England, France, Russia, the United States, a little China, Israel and all the others are gone. “Why is this important for the economy? – we as Bulgarians, but also the European Union as a whole, must make investments in defense, because we currently rely on our partners overseas. And that is why it is important to be integrated into the European Union, because we must have the power to be able to do it. The European Union is the only organization that is constructed in such a way that we have the right of veto, regardless of how big we are. This also gives us the opportunity to push in which direction the European Union should go“, said the leader of the PP.
“If Bulgaria tries to do these things in isolation and at the same time the war in Iran is coming, the price of gas rises, the price of oil too. The only chance is to react together with the European Union, as we did in 2022 with a package of anti-crisis measures that are not based on the principle of “I won't give it to you because you're a little richer. In crisis situations, we have to work on a scale, because there are structural problems for the entire industry and the entire population“, the former finance minister believes.
“Defense is not a question of whether we have money, it is not a question of whether we have technology. As we saw, we have both money and technology. The question is that there is no person who has the legitimacy to defend Europe. Therefore, the first major political task that we have to solve is to have a directly elected European president, just as there is a directly elected American president, so that there is a person who can defend Europe“, said Assen Vassilev.
According to him, in addition, if we want to develop economically, to become a rich country, we must also raise the issue of migration. Europe should do as Australia does, as Canada did - accept only people with visas, not illegal ones, but those it needs for the labor market. Educated, pre-screened. This requires us to have a common understanding that migration for humanitarian reasons really means humanitarian reasons, not economic ones.
BULGARIA IS YOURS. YOU HAVE TO DECIDE
In conclusion, Assen Vassilev said: “In crisis situations, we must work on a scale, because there are structural problems for the entire industry for the entire population. We must really be able to start defending our interests, to decide ultimately what kind of economy we want to build, which happens in a conversation with business and citizens. Do we want to imitate, do we want to be an entrepreneurial economy, do we want to be just a normal economy that relies on chance. If we want to be entrepreneurial, are we ready to argue with the European Union and its rules and negotiate within these rules the freedom to help young companies compete with large industries? And ultimately, how do we spend our common money through the budget so that the economy can move forward in a way that is fair and in a way that does not drive people out of the country, but brings them back“
“This is not a question for politicians. This is a question for you. Bulgaria is yours. You must make this decision“, urged Asen Vassilev.