„Currently, about 10 EU countries are in an excessive deficit procedure. Bulgaria is the 11th, there is nothing to fear. The budget situation is difficult, but not catastrophic or apocalyptic“, said Vladislav Panev, MP from "Democratic Bulgaria" in “Face to Face" on bTV.
According to him, some of the other 10 countries have a much larger deficit than Bulgaria.
Regarding the replacement of the special commercial manager of "Lukoil" Rumen Specsov with Evgeni Simeonov, Panev comments: "Every government has the right to appoint people it trusts. My information about the new special governor Evgeni Simeonov is that he has good friendly relations with Prime Minister Radev. We will see what his qualifications are".
„The reason why the EC is now putting us in this procedure is that according to its data, the deficit for 2026 will probably be over 4%. Everything is in the hands of the current government, which must present and adopt a budget with a deficit of up to 3% - or with defense spending slightly higher, so that we meet these requirements and the monitoring procedure is dropped,“ explained Panev.
As for the deficit of 7.4%, which Galab Donev announced today, he recalled that two of the deputy finance ministers were service ministers in some of the cabinets of the then President Rumen Radev.
“They also announced such bombastic data about the budget deficit of 6, 7 and more percent, which later turned out to be not so true. In the end, the state ended up with a normal deficit of about 3%, said the MP from “Democratic Bulgaria“.
“It seems to me that the government is overdoing the apocalyptic pictures in order to make themselves heroes by publishing a lower deficit and saying that they have done a lot of things out of bravery“, believes Vladislav Panev.
According to him, there is also a much worse scenario of introducing a deficit of 5-6% into the National Assembly.
“Such a deficit is something very bad, because in addition to indebtedness to future generations with loans, it also means an increase in inflation“, explained the MP from “Democratic Bulgaria“.