Bulgaria's Retail Sales Surge as EU Faces Decline
Retail sales across the European Union showed a decline in December, with both the eurozone and the EU reporting decreases
As was clear from the start, implementing the recently brokered European Fiscal Union is set to be problematic, as EU members are likely to bring to the table conflicting views as to its fleshing out.
Among the first specific indicators for this is the fact that just days after the European Council, the UK, Hungary, Romania - and Bulgaria - all refused to contribute money to an EU bailout fund at the IMF.
Britain's position is clear and expected, as it was the only EU member state which right from the start voiced a principled refusal to support the fiscal union and the deeper integration it required.
This has prompted a wave of comments to the effect that the UK has for various reasons taken up a course of determined distancing from the European Union.
Hungary and Romania have both more or less recently embarked on loan programs with the IMF. On top, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban's cabinet has been pursuing a self-styled isolationist and eurosceptic policy.
Bulgaria's position is rather more baffling, given that the country was among those who staunchly supported creating a deeper fiscal union, albeit not being a eurozone member.
The official arguments of the Bulgarian Ministry of Finance make things even more confusing: "Bulgaria is not a party to the Treaty establishing the European Stability Mechanism and has no financial commitments in regard to it."
Among the percepts in the reinforced fiscal union agreement is the furthering of the selfsame European Stability Mechanism. Go figure.
Then there is the explicit rebuffal of the value of solidarity among EU members, as concerns the IMF bailout:
"Bulgaria will not take part in programmes to support financially undisciplined countries," said FinMin Simeon Djankov to EU counterparts, as reported by Bulgarian media.
Has the Bulgarian government secretly adopted a UK-style attitude against the EU as a political union?
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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