There are very few changes in the arrangement of the lists for the upcoming elections. They were made with the consent of both "Democratic Bulgaria" and "Continuing the Change". What we tried to do was to include a lot more civilians in the lists, to have a presence from the medical and teaching professions, since for several years we have been working consistently in both areas - both in education and in health care, in order to improve both quality and funding.
This commented in the studio of "More from the day" on BNT the MP from PP-DB Asen Vasilev.
You are talking about a minimum wage of 1,000 euros, an average wage of 2,000 euros, the presenter noted and asked him how they would achieve it.
„The process of determining and placing a person on the Magnitsky List is 12 months. Mr. Peevski was appointed to it during the management of GERB. This requires references, documents and data to be provided. There is no way a person can be included in this list for a few days”, explained Asen Vassilev.
„The future of Bulgaria depends on enough people coming out and voting and continuing the path of development of the country, he believes.
Asen Vassilev refused to answer the question whether they would work together with DPS-Dogan. He defined the topic as a family feud. He called to see who would enter parliament first. “We are interested in realizing the ideas that are important for Bulgaria. The two cabinets we made fulfilled our ideas. There is no good or bad DPS“, the politician also said.
„You cannot give money that is not made”, Vassilev emphasized. “Everything we promise is achievable and already done. According to him, in recent years, companies have started to catch up three times more. What we did was – we gave them competitive cheap energy. Investors who are willing to pay a high salary come in and those who want cheap labor leave. The main goal of the PP is to be first in the elections," explained the former finance minister.
"The first step was funding, the second step, of course, is quality. We also have some interesting additions, such as Mr. Panikian, who is the chairman of the board of the Armenian Church, entered the list in Sofia and Plovdiv. In Kardzhali, we have a local leader, Mr. Sabakhtin Gyukce, who is supported by all expatriate organizations of Bulgarians in Turkey. So we have people from the civil sector who got involved, we are trying as much as possible to expand representation in these lists", Vassilev explained.
He also pointed out that they have a grid between the two parties and it is almost the same, with very few differences compared to the grid from the last election. From there, each party decides who will be the leaders:
"We have a coalition agreement to participate in the elections, otherwise there is no way to participate in the elections, of course. The other thing that also happened with us, you know that the lists go from bottom to top excluding the very first lists in 2021, when the party was not yet formed. All other lists with us are approved by the National Council, which is a body with over 100 people. The proposals go through the regional boards, i.e. every district in the country nominates its own candidates and you can see that here in particular there are a lot of changes in the leadership positions and they are exactly in the direction of civilian candidates and new faces", added Asen Vasilev.
During the last three years, we have pursued an economic policy that is quite different from the economic policy pursued in Bulgaria in general. This economic policy made a balance of investments - not to invest only in infrastructure, but also to invest in people, Vasilev emphasized and added:
"We saw quite a large increase in income. For the first time, we are not the last in terms of income in the EU. We are penultimate. It's not much of a brag to be second to last out of 27 countries, but we still came off the bottom. My great pride as finance minister is that these investments in human capital, in the people of the country, through education, through health care, through income, through, for example, the tax credit for young families, through free textbooks for children in school up to the 12th grade, through this, to have benefits for the first day of school - all this helped young families to have more children. If you look at the demographic picture last year, we have 46,000 more people who came to Bulgaria than left, one city settled in Bulgaria. We have 600 more children than the previous year."