The pale pink wedding between PP-DB-SS and GERB became a fact during the vote on the Budget 2024 of the Capital Municipality. This was stated by the leader of the socialists in Sofia and chairman of the Local Coalition "BSP for Bulgaria". in SOS Ivan Takov. The budget was adopted after the proposal of the mayor Vasil Terziev and the most numerous political group in SOS PP-DB-SS was supported by GERB. The municipal councilors from the Local Coalition "BSP for Bulgaria" voted "against", reports from the BSP-Sofia press center.
"What happened today in the session was predictable. Just a month ago, I said that during the budget vote, it will become clear who is who in the Metropolitan Municipal Council. At the national level they were taken apart, at the local level they were put together. The pale pink wedding in the municipality is already a fact. Congratulations to PP-DB-SS and GERB", said Ivan Takov.
"In practice, the PP-DB-SS group adopted the GERB budget today. In the hall during the session we commented that the budget proposed for voting at 95%" overlaps with last year's GERB. That is, they voted for the same budget against which we have had completely fair criticism for years and have refused to support. For us, what happened today is not a surprise, it was expected. But we are disappointed that our proposals, which were reasonable and good for Sofia and the citizens, were not accepted. Unfortunately, in a year we will again talk about the serious non-implementation of this budget. Even during its discussion in one of the committees, a municipal councilor from GERB commented that Fandakova did not fulfill her capital program, now and PP-DB-SS will not fulfill it. The budget could have been greatly improved, there could have been a new and different policy in the Metropolitan Municipality, but obviously we will not see this from the new composition of the Metropolitan Municipal Council, which is supposedly dominated by PP-DB-SS. For us, this is the big disappointment", Takov also commented.
The municipal councilor from MK "BSP for Bulgaria" Vanya Grigorova called on the councilors from PP-DB-SS and GERB to hold talks with the people's representatives from their political groups, so that they keep their promise and allocate funds to increase the salaries of transport and medical workers. "This must happen as quickly as possible, because otherwise we will have to rely on empty promises, commented Vanya Grigorova. Because Asen Vassilev will leave soon, and after that we will have no one to hold accountable for the broken promises. We talked about having additional funds to increase the basic salaries of those employed in transport by another 15% from the middle of this year. We wanted additional funds for spare parts, for granting loans to the two companies "Electrotransport" and "Automotive". This is not yet scheduled to happen. And such a decision was voted by the SOS. Let's try to make our decisions more sustainable from now on," Grigorova also said.
Diana Tonova, municipal councilor from the MK Local Coalition "BSP for Bulgaria", commented that with the submitted report with the alternative budget, the group of socialists has shown how to make a balanced budget, in which there is assumed realistic income and expenses. "Unfortunately, the PP-DB-SS went along the lines of GERB and once again created the comfort of planning understated revenues and unrealistically overstated expenses," she said. "If they had adopted our approach and our proposals for increasing the revenue part, now there would be more than 8 million BGN for health care this year. There would be more funds for housing policy and community centers...".
The municipal councilor from the Local Coalition "BSP for Bulgaria" Voyslav Todorov noted that in the 2024 Budget of the Municipality of Sofia, there are 39 million BGN revenues from the sale of municipal housing. "These are some of the last municipal housing. How much of these funds were allocated by PP-DB-SS for the construction of new ones? There is no answer because there is no such money, he said. Therefore, we proposed to set aside at least half of these funds - BGN 18 million, to start restoring the municipal housing stock. Unfortunately, our report was not accepted".