site.btaMedia Review: January 6

EURO CHANGEOVER

Trud warns in its main story that after Bulgaria adopted the euro as its official currency on January 1, many traders may be tempted to raise prices. The daily says that when a customer is given a price in euro, they are advised to multiply it by two to get the equivalent in Bulgarian leva before deciding whether to buy the respective product or service (the official exchange rate is 1.95583 leva for one euro). This is particularly relevant in the services sector, where the requirement to display all prices in writing is applied more liberally. The daily notes that retailers are required to display prices in both euro and leva until August 8, 2026. Back in 2025, prices were often shown in leva first, and then in euro, but now, the order is being reversed, with the price in euro appearing first on the tag and the price in leva coming second. Since the euro price is numerically lower than the leva price, people can be misled into buying things which they found expensive previously.

Duma reports that euro starter coin sets, which banks in Bulgaria began selling a month ago, turned out to be insufficient. Days after the country adopted the euro officially, retailers have difficulty giving their customers change in euro, particularly in smaller outlets, although the law requires them to do so. Curiously, some customers insist to receive change in leva, and there have been reports about retailers refusing to accept payments in the single European currency when the Bulgarian word for "euro" is not on the banknotes. In many stores, change is provided in euro only if the customer pays in euro. The daily goes on to say that, according to unconfirmed information, the one-month period (in January) during which both the euro and the lev are in circulation in Bulgaria may be extended by two weeks or a month.

POLITICS

Parties are planning to reform the system of voting in political elections by replacing the usual voting machines with scanning devices which will register each vote after it is cast using a paper ballot, Dnevnik.bg says. Expectations are that the new method will remedy the biggest flaw of voting with paper ballots: the inadvertent or deliberate mistakes in vote counting. Besides, it will offer an alternative to conventional machine voting, which has been compromised.

The proposed use of scanning devices is supported by the parliamentary majority behind the outgoing cabinet: GERB, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – New Beginning, the Bulgarian Socialists Party, and There Is Such a People, and is not resisted by the opposition, although some reservations have been expressed, the website says. The introduction of the new equipment may seem inevitable, but it is uncertain whether it will be available during the upcoming early parliamentary elections, which are expected in March, or at a later point such as the presidential elections in November. But even if new devices are used, many of the problems that go with paper ballots are likely to stay, the story says.

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Sociologist Boryana Dimitrova, who heads the Alpha Research polling agency, shares her expectations about the new year with the readers of Dnevnik.bg in one of a series of interviews which the website has conducted with experts in various fields, journalists and politicians. Dimitrova expects that Bulgaria's development in 2026 will be influenced mainly by the adoption of the euro, which became a fact on January 1, the early parliamentary elections in the spring and the presidential elections in the autumn. She says the dynamism of public protests should not be overlooked either, because they can exert either centrifugal or centripetal pressure on the political forces. "At least initially, the we-are-the-majority-so-we-will-do-what-we-want kind of arrogant approach will not work, regardless of who governs," Dimitrova predicts.

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The 240 members of Bulgaria's 51st National Assembly received BGN 36,551,982.56 (approximately EUR 18.7 million) in salaries during the legislature's tenure from November 11, 2024, until November 30, 2025, the Assembly said, replying to an inquiry from 24 Chasa under the Access to Public Information Act. The amount represents pre-tax gross income. The average monthly base salary of an MP in September 2025 was around BGN 8,000 (EUR 4,000), added to which were office-specific supplements and remuneration for parliamentary committee membership, academic degrees and length of service, plus money for assistants and parliamentary activities.

ECONOMY

Migrant trafficking, like other businesses, has gone for cost optimization and job cuts, says a leading story in 24 Chasa. A once complex system of guides, secure locations and one or two week stays in Bulgaria has turned into a fast transit service which gets the migrants from the border with Turkiye to the border with Serbia in about 15 hours. Trafficking now takes place on secondary roads, away from motorways, and the license plates of migrant-packed vehicles are changed two or three times along the way, the daily has found in an investigation. According to experts, a migrant pays between EUR 3,000 and EUR 7,000 to be transported through Bulgaria. The price depends on the difficulty of the ride and the distance travelled. Most of the money goes to the Turkish masterminds of the migrant smuggling ring, and the drivers get a relatively small portion. In the past, a payment of about EUR 5,000 per migrant would be distributed among more recipients than now, because there used to be guides, "landlords", and two drivers instead of one.

FOREIGN RELATIONS

In Trud, two different writers describe the extraction of Venezuela's president Nicolas Maduro by US forces on January 3 as a "brazen military operation" and a "spectacular victory". The first of them, Rumen Mihaylov, deplores reactions from Brussels and some important European capitals as "diffident, hesitant, discordant and even obsequious". The other writer, Ognyan Daskarev, says: "[T]he brilliant operation of the US Army was a spectacular victory of the American armed forces over the Russian armed forces, because Maduro was armed to the teeth and protected in his bunker precisely by the Kremlin!"

MediaPool.bg quotes Bulgarian MP Delyan Peevski as praising US President Donald Trump for setting "an excellent example". In a position statement published by his party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – New Beginning, Peevski argued: "The democratic world needs strong and bold leadership to defend democracy and freedom from hybrid wars, election rigging and narco-terrorism." The website notes that the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry has not expressed an official position on Maduro's capture in Venezuela and his having been transported to the US to face trial.

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The ongoing blockades in Bulgaria's neighbour Greece are no longer the usual kind of farmer protests; they have transformed into massive farmer riots with geopolitical implications, 24 Chasa says in a signed analysis. According to the author, Boyka Atanasova, the riots will escalate further. The Greek tractor blockades have become a major barrier against one of the world's largest trade agreements.

The conflict between the European Union and South America (the Mercosur bloc) has moved onto Greek highways and such sensitive points as the Kulata crossing on the border with Bulgaria, the analysis goes. The protesters insist that Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis should not sign the agreement. The problem is cheap farm produce originating from South America. Greek agricultural producers are burdened by high EU environmental standards and oppose the opening of source markets of cheap imports produced with methods which are banned in the EU. The Greek blockades are part of a European frontline of farmers going all the way from the Aegean Sea to the Baltic Sea in opposition to the EU agreement with Mercosur.

This is no longer about peaceful protests but rather direct confrontation with the government authorities, Atanasova says. According to her, the Greek farmers are prepared to close the border with Bulgaria altogether. The deployment of forces of the riot control unit MAT shows that the government is more inclined to risk clashes than to change its fiscal policy. A planned 48-hour total blockade in Greece on January 8 and 9 will be aligned with large-scale protests in other European capitals. This sends a clear message to the European Commission that the intended ratification of the agreement with Mercosur in 2026 can trigger unprecedented transport and economic paralysis. For Bulgaria's road hauliers and general public, it means that the risk of further blockades is not limited to the Kulata border crossing as it can affect the main transport routes of the entire EU, the analysis concludes.