The Budget and Finance Committee of the Parliament did not gather a quorum to hold an extraordinary meeting, initiated by "Continuing the Change", at which the employer organizations and trade unions would be heard on the draft budget for 2026.
Earlier today, the press center of "Continuing the Change" announced that signatures were collected to convene an extraordinary meeting of the Budget Committee on the topic at the initiative of the PP. However, the deputies from GERB, BSP, ITN and "DPS-New Beginning" did not come to the meeting. Deputy Minister of Finance Kiril Ananiev was in the hall.
"There is no quorum, there are no employers, there are no unions, I don't see what we are doing here today", commented the chairman of the committee Delyan Dobrev. "Where did you see unions, there was one gentleman who left the hall, but if one person is a representative of the unions", Dobrev commented in response to the exit from the hall of the chief economist of the Confederation of Bulgarian Trade Unions, Lyuboslav Kostov.
In response to a remark by Venko Sabrutev (PP-DB) about the absence of the deputies from the ruling majority and that this is how a debate on the budget is being sabotaged, Dobrev replied that if there is sabotage, it is not only on the part of some of the deputies, but also on the part of the employer organizations and the unions. "Your PR campaign, it seems to me, is failing miserably, because you are not the people who will determine the budget in this country. You were there and saw how far you have come", Dobrev pointed out.
Deputy Minister Kiril Ananiev noted that as Chairman of the Budget Policy Commission of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation (NCTC), he held a meeting with trade unions and employers, at which he explained the budget in its entirety. "We had conversations and debates. Then, at another level, conversations were also held with trade unions and employers, so this connection has not been broken", Ananiev said. "I regret that today it cannot happen at this level in parliament, but it is not the fault of the Ministry of Finance", he added.
"What we saw shows an extremely deep crisis in the ruling majority, unfortunately this crisis is also a crisis for the entire Bulgarian state", the chairman of "We Continue the Change" Asen Vassilev later commented to journalists. "We saw the refusal of the ruling party to join the Budget and Finance Committee, they expelled the representative of the trade unions, saying that there are no trade unions on the committee, and refused to listen to the only representative of the employers who had come. This is not how a budget is made", Vassilev said.
According to him, during all the political crises we have gone through in the last five years, there has never been such a breakdown in the dialogue between the government, trade unions and employers. "We see an absolutely targeted attempt to make the largest tax increase since 1996, despite GERB's claims that they are a right-wing party, and all this in order to maintain the higher salaries of the "clubs", which will increase in some places by over 50 percent in this budget and to fill the coffers of the government," Vassilev pointed out. In his words, if this is not controlled and a reasonable budget is not made for next year, it will lead to a collapse of the economy.
Tomorrow, the draft budgets of the National Health Insurance Fund, the State Social Security Fund and the state for 2026 will be discussed at an extraordinary meeting of the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation, the government information service announced.