After the evaluation Prime Minister Ognyan Gerdzhikov made of the caretaker cabinet’s first month in office yesterday, today the country’s accession to the Eurozone is given extensive coverage by the press.

Sega frontpages a headline: “Gerdzhikov in a hurry to usher Bulgaria into the Eurozone waiting room,” but further down notes that the political parties largely ignored this issue in their pre-electoral programmes.  In Ognyan Gerdzhikov’s words, Bulgaria now meets three of the four criteria for entering the ERM 2 mechanism, with the last one of them open to possible coordination with the EU members, even though success cannot be guaranteed. In a commentary for Sega, Georgi Angelov writes that no country has entered ERM 2 in the past 10 years because some do not want to, others can’t, and instead of setting itself unrealistic goals, Bulgaria should concentrate on getting itself taken off the black list of countries with macroeconomic imbalances and make efforts to enter Schengen and put an end to the European Commission monitoring of its judicial system.

Capital newspaper asks what Gerdzhikov means exactly because Bulgaria meets all four of the so-called Maastricht criteria – a budget deficit below 3 percent, debt below 60 percent of the GDP, a low inflation rate and long term interest rates. The requirement Bulgaria does not meet, the paper goes on, is that according to the European Central Bank, the national legislation in this specific sphere has not been harmonized fully and that the country has not spent two years in the ERM 2 mechanism.

Citing expert analyses by the Ministry of Finance, 24 Chassa newspaper also notes that Bulgaria has met all technical criteria for entering the Eurozone “waiting room” but adds that before submitting an application, the Eurozone countries want to see a stable government in Sofia and that is the reason why the Bulgarian National Bank is not in a hurry to submit it.

Standart on its part writes that the question of the country’s speedy entry into the Eurozone was actually raised by caretaker Foreign Minister Radi Naydenov. In the words of the Bulgarian foreign minister the decision is not a popular one, but seeing as the caretaker cabinet of Stefan Sofianski submitted the country’s application for membership of NATO, now the current caretaker cabinet can “do something that adherents and the people who have come to understand the advantages can support.”  

Compiled by Stoimen Pavlov

English version: Milena Daynova