For the sixth consecutive day, Sofia has been blocked by the public transport strike. The orchestrated pressure on the mayor is intensifying. The goal is clear: forced early termination of his mandate. By Emilia Milcheva.
In Sofia, buses, trams and trolleybuses have not been running for the sixth day, and there are no great hopes for an agreement soon between the mayor's administration and the protesting drivers. The capital, blocked by the public transport strike, where a quarter of Bulgaria lives and works, is also facing a garbage crisis. Starting today, two companies that clean eight of the city's 24 districts have threatened to stop waste collection due to unpaid 9 million leva.
Sofia's 2025 budget, with planned expenditures of 2.84 billion leva, has not yet been adopted, and for this reason the Sofia Municipality is delaying payments of over 100 million leva. Companies that carry out repair and construction activities have also stopped working due to unpaid funds.
And Mayor Vasil Terziev assures that he has a plan to deal with the crisis.
Left without one of his coalition partners - the "Save Sofia" party (SS), which withdrew its confidence and its municipal councilors separated into an independent group, Terziev continues to rely on the support of the PP-DB. In front of the municipality building on "Moskovska" 33 today, citizens who have been organizing on social networks for several days in an event under the slogan: "Support for the Mayor of Sofia against the Mafia".
Under siege
The orchestrated pressure on the capital's mayor is intensifying. The goal is clear - a forced early termination of his mandate, which will happen one way or another. A transport blockade. Containers with mountains of waste around them. A municipal council in which the coalition that supports him does not have a majority - and to top it off, an ongoing court case that challenges the election of Vasil Terziev. (Vanya Grigorova (BSP), who lost the runoff against Terziev by 4,786 votes, is appealing the results.) The real master of the SOS is the so-called "Sofia Mayor" dominated by GERB and BSP. "economic majority", composed of the advisors of GERB, BSP, VMRO, ITN and breakaways from "Vazrazhdane", took control of almost all committees in the SOS.
This majority blocked the update of the 2024 budget and replaced the boards of 6 key municipal companies without competitions - "Toplofikatsiya Sofia", "Sofinvest", "Metropolitan", "Center for Urban Mobility", "Stolichen Autotransport" and "Stolichen Elektrotransport".
The last two companies are now on strike, and their management is in the dark, (as are the others), and only the SOS, which is their principal, can request information. It is not known what the losses are, how the annual subsidies that are granted are spent (16.5 million leva for road transport alone), how bloated the administration is. According to the deputy mayor for financial affairs Ivan Vassilev, there are a total of 700 administrative staff in the four companies responsible for transport in Sofia. However, there are not enough drivers - 100 people in electric transport and another 250 in bus transport.
The mayor of the capital is showing intransigence on the demands of the unions: a 400 leva increase in salaries from March 1 this year, 500 leva for 2026, 600 leva in 2027 for all 7,000 employees. In addition, they insist on providing sanitary facilities and toilets, improving lighting, heating and work uniforms. The offer of Terziev and his team is a one hundred leva increase and a higher bonus, which the protesters refuse.
The protests have everything - commands from the party towers, union clientelism (trade union leaders are municipal councilors from GERB and BSP) and accumulated injustice. The problems are not new, they have accumulated over the years of GERB governing the capital, but Terziev did not address them in time, even though he is serving half of his term. Workers in public transport began protesting more than a month before the strike on May 14, but the mayor ignored the problem.
According to the chairman of the standing committee on transport and road safety in the SOS Ivan Takov (BSP), the committee has been waiting for the economic framework for transport to be provided for preliminary review for 6 months. "More than a month ago, we requested and developed a scenario of the economic framework with an increase in the salaries of workers in transport companies by 100, 200, 300 and 400 leva. So far, nothing has been provided to us by the mayor's team," said Takov. After the resignation of the deputy mayor for transport Iliyan Pavlov, however, his replacement has not been found. Incidentally, the same Pavlov had said that for 2024, "Sofia has a record budget for urban transport, for which 505 million leva have been provided.". How was this money spent, which is almost a fifth of last year's expenses of the capital?
"Since we have before us complete inadequacy from the mayor and the administration of Sofia Municipality, obviously SOS will have to take matters into its own hands", said Takov a few days ago. In fact, SOS has not let them down - and is unlikely to allow any change in the work of transport companies, which are still at a loss. The "economic majority" in SOS has been reproduced in the parliament and the executive branch, so there will be no support for reform from there.
Can the state still help? Tens of millions of levs are poured into the capital's urban transport every year. For subsidies (which do not finance personnel costs, b.a.) for 2025, the Ministry of Finance allocates 106 million leva to Sofia Municipality, which is 17 million leva more than last year - that is the money requested for the security of the metro from the Ministry of Interior. (For comparison, 89 million leva in subsidies were allocated for 2022-2023, the same as for 2024 alone.) Finance Minister Temenuzhka Petkova advised Terziev to restructure expenses - there is no budget for 2025 adopted yet, in order to provide funds for higher salaries.
"I am coming with the decisions and the team…" Where are they?
In the fall of 2023, economist Vasil Terziev, one of the creators of "Telerik" - a ΙΤ company sold for a record $262 million, assured Sofia residents that he would find solutions to the city's problems. Two years later, even the Sofia Municipality website is the same.
Terziev is not the only mayor in Bulgaria who works without a majority in the municipal council. However, he has been criticized for isolating himself with his team of advisors, instead of seeking majorities on certain goals and priorities in the Municipal Council. Sofia Municipality still does not have the promised new administration structure. There is also no real management program with deadlines and specific measures - the 19 priorities announced in mid-2024 are far from such. Transport and cleanliness are key for a city, and the public procurement for the selection of companies for cleaning the city for 2025 has not yet been launched - an activity for which 302.1 million leva have been allocated.
Until the end of July last year, the chief architect of Sofia was Zdravko Zdravkov, who had held this position since 2016. Then, initially temporarily, and after a controversial competition - permanently, the post was taken by arch. Bogdana Panayotova, Terziev's favorite. Her election caused a shake-up in the PP-DB coalition - in a public position "We continue the change" he objected to Panayotova, "whose professional biography and actions raise serious doubts about the integrity and independence in decision-making". In response, the mayor explained that he had sent her to a polygraph and everything was fine. Construction in Sofia continues at full speed.
The caustic comment by GERB leader Boyko Borisov that Sofia residents must "suffer the change", that is, the election of Vasil Terziev, may well mobilize PP-DB supporters. Sofia is key for the coalition - 14 of its 36 deputies were elected from the capital's districts. But the effect will be temporary. In the long run, Terziev will have to choose - to be brave and act politically, or to finish his term as the face of change with his hands tied due to a chronic lack of will to clear out old models.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State Duma as a whole.