After the asset declarations of Bulgarian public figures that were released yesterday, all the media - quite logically - set out to show how wealthy some of the current ministers are.
But this is not the first time this has happened. Rich people come into power and quite often come out of it even richer. And the children see it.
The more curious thing is something else.
If we look away from the obvious rich people at the top and go down one or two floors in the government building, we start to see far more interesting things.
A current and former Deputy Minister of Finance, for example, may have over 300 thousand euros in a bank deposit. We are talking about Lyudmila Petkova - a person whose professional biography is almost entirely related to the state administration: tax service, Ministry of Finance, Deputy Minister, Minister, ADFI, Deputy Minister again.
This, of course, does not mean that her money was acquired illegally. Nor does it necessarily mean that it was accumulated only from salaries. It only means that it is curious to ask how a person with an almost entirely public career in one of the poorest countries in the EU comes to such a size of liquid savings.
Especially when we look outside.
In verified public declarations of people in comparable positions in richer European countries such as Lithuania and Slovenia, one can see personal savings of the order of €20-50 thousand, and in more affluent cases - around €100 thousand. You can even find a Slovenian state secretary who, before politics, managed a large private company, was a minister, deputy prime minister and speaker of parliament - and yet his identifiable financial assets are significantly below those of the Bulgarian career civil servant.
This is just an innocent comparison. It is not evidence of a crime.
But if we start doing the same with members of boards of state-owned companies, heads of agencies, funds, commissions, deputy ministers and all sorts of other inhabitants of the second and third floors of power, it may turn out that the more interesting question is not how many rich people enter power, but how many wealthy people power itself produces.
And then it is already worth asking ourselves whether Bulgaria is at the bottom of the EU not because we are not capable enough to create a well-functioning economy, but because for decades we have cultivated not just a high-ranking state administration, but a real state bourgeoisie – a closed layer that reproduces itself year after year, passes from ministry to agency, from agency to board, from board back to ministry and often serves not so much the public interest as the system that created it.
And while we wonder why Bulgaria still can't catch up with Europe, perhaps part of the answer has been right in front of our eyes all along.
But we've only looked at the first floor.