The Annual State Budget Act is one the most important bills in Bulgaria over the respective year and that is why its discussion and adoption are subject to wide interest shown not only by political forces, finance experts and MPs, but also by the community.

The financial ministry said the draft bill was ‘boring’ this year. The cabinet’s opponents called it ‘a budget of the status quo’ and of the reforms’ freezing. So nobody expected any drama, but exactly the opposite happened with lots of excitement involved. No one had expected that the regular presidential polls in November would result in the resignation of the Borissov government. The outgoing cabinet considered the withdrawal of the state budget draft, but in the end the latter was adopted after numerous clashes. On the same day the EP adopted the EU budget for the next year. However, the governmental crisis continues and some expect it to become political. The head of state Rosen Plevneliev has to appoint a caretaker government now which will have to work with the budget inherited by the end of January when the newly elected president takes over. Rumen Radev will most likely exchange the caretaker cabinet with his own one for the period until the early parliamentary elections end-March or early-April 2017. The main financial bill will have to be complied with, as there will be no acting parliament to change it. However, the new government will most likely have to update the budget one way or another. So what’s just been adopted won’t last long, it appears.

The budget itself in terms of macroeconomics and from the social point of view is nothing special – slight delay of economic growth, more money allocated to security and defense, no new external debts, quite acceptable deficit and almost insignificant increasing of social benefits. There is no economic drama, one can find it in the political chaos that the country found itself into right when everything looked good and stable.

English version: Zhivko Stanchev