site.btaUPDATED Parliament’s Budget Committee Cancels Thursday Meeting on 2026 State Budget Bill

The meeting of the National Assembly’s Budget and Finance Committee, which was scheduled for Thursday to review the 2026 State Budget Bill at second reading, has been cancelled, according to the Parliament’s website.

On Wednesday the Parliamentary Budget and Finance Committee adopted at second reading the draft budgets of Public Social Insurance and the National Health Insurance Fund for 2026.

On Wednesday evening, people flooded streets in central Sofia at the square known as the “Power Triangle”, where the new National Assembly building is flanked by the President’s administration building and the Council of Ministers on Wednesday evening, to protest the adoption of the 2026 budget bills. The protest lasted more than six hours and ended after midnight. The gathered citizens formed a human chain around the National Assembly building and booed the MPs as they left the building. The demonstrators chanted "Mafia". "The budget has a hole in it, we do not want bankruptcy", "No consensus? No second reading", "You are using our money to make trouble", "I want a future in Bulgaria", "We are fed up! We want to live normally" some of the posters carried by protesters said.

Earlier on Thursday, GERB-UDF Floor Leader and GERB Chair Boyko Borissov told reporters in Parliament’s lobby that he had advised Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov and Finance Minister Temenuzhka Petkova to withdraw the draft budget or find a legal mechanism to proceed, given that it has already passed first reading. Borissov said that until dialogue is restored with the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation and an agreement is reached on how the country will be governed in the coming years, the government should operate under the existing budget for 2025.

Following Borissov’s statement and a discussion with the partners in the governing coalition, Prime Minister and GERB member Rosen Zhelyazkov said: "We will sit down at the negotiating table, we will once again try to restore dialogue with the trade unions and the employers, and we will try to achieve macroeconomic indicators for the budget that will be satisfactory for a large part of business and for a large part of society. […] We need to find the golden mean in income policy, and I am confident that in December, through dialogue with the trade unions and the employers, we can achieve it,” he added. “As early as this week we will take the necessary steps to invite the employers and the trade unions and to begin, I would say, this process anew,” Zhelyazkov stressed.