Bulgarians Join Balkan Protest Against Soaring Food Prices
Bulgaria has joined Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro in organizing protests against rising food prices
In the never-ending annals about Europe's debt crisis, Bulgaria normally does not feature visibly. But recent suggestions that the poorest country in the European Union could escape the financial crisis unscathed thanks to - surprise, surprise – its weakness have left me grinding my teeth in frustration.
Is a transformation of Darwin's "survival of the fittest" into a "survival of the weakest" theory possible? Hardly, even in the world of economics.
Some of the points of the new weird theory however have been reasonable. Unlike its neighbors Bulgarians were spared radical austerity programs, which are implemented to help the economy pick up. Bulgaria's economy was driven by rising exports. Its debt-to-GDP ratio is low.
But that sounded reassuring ten months ago.
Now Bulgaria's economic recovery has slowed to the weakest over the last four quarters. The forecast is gloomy as the euro crisis dents demand for Bulgarian exports. Consumer spending shrinks too. Savings are the only thing on the rise, but the joy those figures bring is undermined by the fact that the lion's share of the stashed money is in the hands of a meager 5% of the population.
Truth is Finance Minister Djankov's belt-tightening policy created the illusion of a healthy economy on the back of the people. The average Bulgarian is three times poorer than the average EU citizen and is just getting poorer.
Bulgaria's economy is free falling and it is only a question of time for it to translate into a heavily stratified society.
Bulgaria can hardly boast of having a market economy. Its economy is built on political circles, upon which the economic circles rise.
The model could eventually – as I have recently warned in another article - come close to a feudal society, in which the boss and his closest aides are well off, bossing around the thousands of dependent and equal ordinary citizens.
True, the most serious problems in the eurozone have been triggered by and are now concentrated among the old members of the eurozone and the euro bloc as a whole. True, Bulgaria is a country with healthy figures, which sounds nice to the bureaucrats even though they know very well people here are suffering and the country can neither heal nor kill the European Union.
But to say that Bulgaria will come out of the crisis as a winner and be cited as an example is baffling, at least my, logic.
Nip/Tuck seems to sum up best Djankov's philosophy - a great philosophy if you don't care about the human cost and know that you can leave the sinking ship at any moment.
The state will survive, but what about its people?
If we look at history, there are not many cases in which relations between Bulgaria and Russia at the state level were as bad as they are at the moment.
The term “Iron Curtain” was not coined by Winston Churchill, but it was he who turned it into one of the symbols of the latter part of the twentieth century by using it in his famous Fulton speech of 1946.
Hardly anything could be said in defense of the new government's ideological profile, which is quite blurry; at the same time much can be disputed about its future "pro-European" stance.
Look who is lurking again behind the corner – the tandem of Advent International and Deutsche Bank, respectively the buyer of the Bulgarian Telecom Company in 2004 and the advisor of the Bulgarian government in the sweetest deal of the past decade, seem t
We have seen many times this circus which is being played out during the entire week and it only shows one thing - there is no need of a caretaker government in Bulgaria.
You have certainly noticed how many times President Rosen Plevneliev used the phrase “a broad-minded person” referring to almost every member of his caretaker government.
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