Bulgarian center-right party GERB has returned to Parliament for the first-reading discussion of the budget revision.

The parliamentary committees on budget and finance and social and economic policy are holding a joint sitting on the project which was adopted at an extraordinary meeting of the government on Monday.

Apart from the members of the three committees, the sitting is attended by a number of GERB MPs, including former ministers and deputy ministers in the GERB government like Lilyana Pavlova, Vladislav Goranov, Ivaylo Moskovski, Totyu Mladenov, Tomislav Donchev, and Delyan Dobrev.

The sitting is also attended by GERB MPs Krasimir Stefanov (former Director of the National Revenue Agency), Svetoslav Ivanov, Krasimir Velchev, Menda Stoyanova and Svetlana Angelova.

Finance Minister Petar Chobanov, Labor Minister Hasan Ademov and Economy and Energy Minister Dragomir Stoynev, as well as representatives of employers' organizations and trade unions, are also present.

According to reports of the BGNES news agency, the representatives of the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) party are only "guests" of the sitting and are not entitled to vote.

Shortly after Monday's government sitting, GERB leader and former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov vowed that GERB MPs would return to Parliament for the vote on the budget actualization because they believed that it would be a catastrophe for the state.

He specified that the MPs of the center-right party would also attend the discussion by parliamentary committees.

After the inaugural sitting of Bulgaria's 42nd National Assembly on May 21, Boyko Borisov, former Prime Minister and leader of GERB, declared that the party would boycott parliament sittings by non-attendance and refusal to register for voting until the Parliament was ready to discuss Election Code amendments and new early elections were scheduled.

In a Monday statement, Borisov argued that the discussion on the budget was much more important than Election Code amendments, adding that the MPs of GERB would try to dissuade their colleagues from approving a loan of up to BGN 1 B and to win them over in favor of a BGN 150 M package of measures earmarked for the most vulnerable social groups.

The budget update envisages increasing the deficit by around BGN 500 M and increasing the borrowing limit by BGN 1 B.

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