There are no plans to change the pension model, affect the second pension pillar or redirect social security contributions to the first one in the budget sent to the European Commission on October 15. This was stated by Konstantin Prodanov, Chair of the Budget Committee from “Progressive Bulgaria,” in an interview with Nova TV.
“That is precisely why it is not included in the budget plan that was sent to Brussels for approval on October 15. It appears nowhere in the official correspondence between us and the European Commission,” Prodanov said.
According to him, after the budget plan was sent, several letters were exchanged between the Bulgarian authorities and the European Commission, the latest dated November 2 and signed by Minister Donev. The Commission must approve the document’s overall parameters. The European Commission states that eurozone countries submit their draft budgets by October 15, after which an assessment is made of their compliance with European fiscal rules.
Prodanov said that different ideas may be considered at the expert level in the individual ministries, but this does not mean they have been adopted as government policy.
“The job of an expert in any ministry is to propose all kinds of ideas. At the expert level, all kinds of scenarios are explored and presented to the political leadership, and if it embraces them, they become reality,” he said.According to the Chair of the Budget Committee, the opposition could have waited for the budget to be officially presented in order to check whether it actually contained such intentions. He described the claims that had circulated as an attempt to divert attention from the election results and the audit by the Bulgarian National Audit Office.
In the interview, Prodanov said that the audit by the Bulgarian National Audit Office had not received sufficient public attention because of the dispute over the pension model. According to him, the audit shows that public finances had been managed without sufficient responsibility over the past six years, while some decisions had been motivated by short-term electoral objectives.
He cited the increase in remuneration as an example of decisions that had not been backed by sustainable funding.
“They increased by more than twofold over this period, while tax revenues lagged 25 percentage points behind that,” Prodanov said.The Chair of the Committee also said that the caretaker governments of Rumen Radev had not prepared independent budgets, but had implemented already adopted financial frameworks. He cited as an exception the budget update in 2021, prepared by Asen Vasilev, who was the caretaker finance minister at the time.
Prodanov pointed to the discrepancy between the initial values of contracts and the amounts ultimately paid as another problem. According to him, there are dozens of similar cases, including a contract for the routine repair and maintenance of road infrastructure whose value increased more than 20-fold.
He said that certificates for completed work worth BGN 1.2 billion had been withheld, along with unapproved indexation claims worth around BGN 300 million. According to him, these concerned activities carried out in 2025 and previous years.
The Bulgarian National Audit Office separately reported that between 2020 and June 30, 2026, the Road Infrastructure Agency had signed contracts worth BGN 18 billion against a budget of BGN 11 billion. According to the audit institution, the commitments undertaken exceeded available funding by BGN 6.8 billion.