If President Rumen Radev supports the request of a large part of the people for a referendum, he should have gone to the protesters. ... Our fight is for a referendum, we do not want our opinion to be imposed unilaterally and if Bulgarians say that they want to enter the eurozone, we will forever remain silent on the topic!
This was stated to the Bulgarian National Radio by Deyan Nikolov, a municipal councilor from "Vazrazhdane" in the Sofia Municipal Council and leader of the party organization in Sofia. He stressed that they insist on holding a referendum "so that it is known that the entire Bulgarian people bear responsibility for this decision":
"Even if they make a mistake and it turns out that they kept the Bulgarian lev, for example, and this is a wrong decision, the Bulgarian people have the right to make this mistake and bear responsibility for it. Because at the moment, who will bear responsibility if our entry into the eurozone turns out to be a huge mistake. Only the entire people can express their will through a referendum and then bear responsibility".
We continue with the protests and will fight for the resignation of this government, he also emphasized and pointed out that "threats of fierce resistance do not mean that something radical will happen in the state, in politics everything is a metaphor".
In Nikolov's words, the eurozone "is planned to be at three speeds and we are at the third speed":
"Our voice in the overall development of this project will be about 0.4% of the time - that's how much we will participate, Bulgaria's weight is 0.4% of the eurozone economy and that's how much we will weigh in decision-making, i.e. negligible".
The currency board is our own policy, he said, adding that no one can say that "we are not independent at the moment, because the fact that we have decided to fix the exchange rate according to certain rules is entirely our decision and this makes us independent from the point of view that we have decided that this provides us with the stability that we need at the moment":
"If we decide tomorrow, we can make any decision we want regarding our monetary policy - we can remove the board, we can tie ourselves to another currency, we can exercise our own monetary policy, have a floating exchange rate. If we enter the eurozone tomorrow, this option completely disappears".
According to him, the only benefit of entering the eurozone is the lack of currency conversion costs.