Over the past month, there was a whole set of budgets that we returned, voted on, tried again. The first option, which was the most unsuccessful, reflected the coalition's ambition to raise incomes and have a very large investment program - more than the capabilities of the tax system. After the parties gave their wishes, the Ministry of Finance valued them and said: “These are the expenses and, in order to maintain a 3% deficit, taxes must be raised. It is believed that raising the “Dividend” tax and social security contributions will be the most painless. The International Monetary Fund has been proposing social security contributions for a very long time. This was stated by the chairman of the budget committee in the National Assembly, Delyan Dobrev from GERB, in the program "Panorama" on BNT, quoted by novini.bg.
The only thing I have said about this budget is that the next one will be better, without knowing that this one will not be watched at all, he added.
The second budget did not increase taxes, had a reduced capital program, that is, less investment, at the same time it maintained the generous policy regarding income and social spending. Why was there an item on the agenda of the "extension law" and the "Law on the state budget for 2026" on the same day? We were ready to accept the second version of the budget, in which there was no increase in taxes, but at the same time there was a significant increase in income. Because if you compare the extended budget, with which we will spend 1/12 of each month, with the last version of the budget, you will see that it had a 10%, even in some cases a 15% increase in income, while this one does not. There is a text that says that salaries will be indexed with inflation, but this contradicts not only the Public Finance Act, but also the previous text. In this case, there is ambiguity and this text cannot be applied, Dobrev explained.
The fact is that there is no government. When there is no government, the budget must be adopted by some majority in parliament. Obviously, there is no longer a majority, because if there was one, there would be a government, so a consensus had to be found in the National Assembly for the adoption of some kind of budget that included an increase in income, the chairman of the National Assembly's budget committee pointed out.
When asked whether there were any risks to the adoption of the euro from the fact that we do not have a regular budget, Delyan Dobrev said: “There are no risks, we have a rolling budget. The only bad news is that for people who will not receive a salary increase of between 10-15%, they will probably receive 3.5%, which is the harmonized inflation index. In this text that the PP-DB pushed into the hall and which contradicts the Public Finance Act, I do not know how it will be implemented by any finance minister, not to mention that if this text is considered by the Constitutional Court, it is no wonder that it will fall. We are no longer responsible, because when you have a coalition of three parties and everyone wants to defend their policy, it turns out that you have a bad version of the budget.
According to Dobrev, the ambition to raise incomes and investments more than the revenues in the budget allow them to bring down those in power is what brought them down. We are all to blame - they for wanting too much, and we for not saying - no.