site.btaFinance Minister Highlights Government's Achievements amid No-Confidence Debate

Finance Minister Temenuzhka Petkova said on Wednesday she would wish every government that, in the first 11 months of its term in office, it achieves for Bulgaria what her government has managed to accomplish.

Petkova, a ranking member of the main ruling GERB party, spoke in the National Assembly as the MPs debated the sixth motion of no confidence in Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov's government, submitted by Continue the Change–Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) and supported by the Alliance for Rights and Freedoms and MECh. The motion concerns the government’s alleged failure in the economic sphere.

Addressing CC-DB, which shared a government with GERB in 2023-2024 led by CC's Nikolay Denkov as prime minister, Petkova said: “You left behind ministries in ruins and destroyed public finances.” She reported that over the past 11 months, her government has completed several important tasks for the country, including the adoption of the State Budget Act for 2025, which enabled Bulgaria to stabilize and maintain sustainability in public finances, allowing progress towards one of its main priorities: membership in the eurozone.

“We renegotiated the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP), a failed plan over the last four years,” the Finance Minister continued. She recalled that after the Borissov cabinet had left the plan back in 2021, successive governments began reworking it, “so much so that it was submitted a year later, after other countries had already utilized a large portion of their funds under the plan.” At the same time, many of the goals and tasks were changed, which later proved to be a major mistake, Petkova added.

“In 11 months, we had to correct the error committed over the last four years, and we succeeded. Thanks to the efforts of the government and the National Assembly, by the end of the year we will receive the second and third payments, which total nearly BGN 4 billion,” the Finance Minister said.

The second payment request under the RRP was submitted on October 7, 2023, for just over EUR 724 million. On November 29, 2024, the European Commission stated that the plan’s implementation was unsatisfactory, with the total sanction for unmet targets exceeding EUR 800 million, Petkova recalled. “In other words, we are not starting from zero, but from minus, and this government has managed to correct your mistakes,” she said.

“If you follow the rule under the Public Finance Act, you will see that, once EU funds and those under contracts where Bulgaria is a party are excluded, it amounts to 40.1% of GDP,” the Finance Minister responded to Martin Dimitrov of CC-DB. For 2025 and 2026, as the RRP concludes in August this year, all renegotiated investments are included in these funds for the redistribution of expenditures. “Let us be objective and view things as they are,” Petkova urged. According to her, the government has achieved a strategic goal as Bulgaria is poised to join the eurozone on January 1, when the nation will take its rightful place in the currency union.

“Over the 11 months, rating agencies have raised our credit rating, and yet you claim that the economy is collapsing. It is not appropriate to generate such tension,” the Finance Minister also emphasized.

She outlined the government’s vision regarding public debt. When for years it has been necessary to explain that maintaining a 3% government deficit is not catastrophic, it turns out to be critical because this deficit is financed through debt. The draft budget for 2026 sets a EUR 9.94 billion limit on new debt, with an additional EUR 60 million allocated for helicopters for firefighting, Petkova specified. The debt limit includes SAFE mechanism funding (defence expenditure) — EUR 3.2 billion; EUR 3.7 billion for deficit financing; EUR 1.4 billion for maturing debt; EUR 1.2 billion for capital increases in certain state companies, including а joint venture with Rheinmetall (EUR 407 million), the national children’s hospital, the Water Utilities Holding, BEH, and Sofia Tech Park; and EUR 500 million for other financing related to the European Central Bank.

“There is nothing in next year’s debt limit that is unnecessary,” the minister emphasised. “The situation with expenditure redistribution, debt, and deficit can be explained very easily because it is based on real numbers contained in the State Budget Law for 2025, the 2026 draft, and in the budgets adopted in previous years,” Petkova noted.

“I hope no one believes that this government has, in 11 months, accumulated such expenditures or is ‘spending like crazy with a machine gun,’ as Martin Dimitrov says. Between 2022 and 2025 alone, the growth of spending on personnel, social payments, and pensions was BGN 33 billion — so yes, there was a machine gun, but it was used by others, not us. We do not buy time; time is given by the people in elections,” Petkova concluded.