Even if you shut us down, organised crime will gladly welcome us.
Vilislava Angelova, judge at the Specialised Criminal Court
I used to think that in the general scheme of things truth does not matter.
General Prosecutor Ivan Geshev
Do not be afraid, Bulgarians. Inflation will only get worse.
Financial expert Mika Zaykova
As a Defence Minister I have no right of personal opinion.
As soon as the news of the Thursday evening arrests broke out a significant chunk of the Bulgarian population went into a frenzied jubilation comparable, according to one observer, to that goal at the 1994 World Championship Bulgaria scored against Germany. That goal. Folks started popping open new bottles of Rakiya and some of Borisov's neighbours in Bankya even organised a small fireworks display. Is the tyrant really going where he should have gone a long time ago?, Bulgarians were asking their Facebook friends.
We have enough sunflower oil to drown the country.
Economy Minister Kornelia Ninova on rumours of sunflower oil shortages
The ruling coalition is cracking along geopolitical lines.
Daniel Mitov, GERB
Borisov's claim that he would fix all current problems in a day is extremely brazen. Where was he in the past 10 years?
Prime Minister Kiril Petkov
Dudes, you are not gods.
Toshko Yordanov, MP for There Is Such a People, to GERB who wanted a longer vacation in December and January on religious grounds
Fulfilling all of our goals in the set timeframe will be hard, but we all realise that you can eat an elephant a bite at a time.
Prime Minister Kiril Petkov
I will ban the State Railway bosses from using government cars. Let them travel by train.
As the dust settles down after Bulgaria's third attempt in a year to elect a government and as the post-election horse-trading begins, there are several key conclusions to be drawn from Boyko Borisov's dramatic downfall and the emergence of the Changes Continued political party.
Polling agencies are not to be trusted.
Borisov's talk is the result of guilty hysteria because he is the reason for the ruinous state of the Bulgarian healthcare system. He had 12 years to reform it, to build a specialised paediatric hospital, to buy medical helicopters and to keep young doctors in Bulgaria.
Bulgarian President Rumen Radev
We are living in the experiment of a majority that does not believe in science.
A sober look at the current mess of Bulgarian politics in the aftermath of 12 years of Boyko Borisov may produce some unexpected if slightly idiosyncratic explanations. Perhaps Bulgaria's political parties are where they are at – namely, at each other's throats – not because they really want to "scrape off" each other from the face of the earth but because... the publicists who invented their names badly miscalculated in the first place. If you, as a foreigner, has trouble understanding what the difference between Stand Up! Mafia Out! and Stand Up.BG! We Are Coming! is, do not worry.
Some analysts were surprised, others were not: the 11 July snap election, called in the wake of the failure of Bulgaria's 45th National Assembly to set up a government, returned more or less the same results. Boyko Borisov's GERB continues to be a large and monolithic political party if led by an increasingly erratic strongman. It was pushed into the second place by a margin of less than a percent by Slavi Trifonov's ITN, or There Is Such a People, grouping. Third comes the beleaguered BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party.
Dignitaries, ministers and even foreign guests were "invited" into the jeep while the Bulgarian prime minster went for a government-provided ride. The video clips were then circulated on social media, attracting a huge number of clicks by both supporters and critics. Eagle-eyed Bulgarians, however, noted there was something wrong with the former prime minister's jeep. Oddly, its number plate was identical to the number plate of an Audi which also belonged to Boyko Borisov's retinue.
The month of June, officially the election campaign month ahead of the early ballot scheduled for 11 July, has been extraordinary even in the standard of Bulgarian politics. Hardly a day has passed without some major or minor scandal bursting out into the open. Mostly, these were caused by the revelations by the President Rumen Radev-appointed caretaker government of gross misdeeds committed by Boyko Borisov's GERB officials or by Boyko Borisov, this country strongman prime minister in 2009-2021, himself.
Usually made in his inimitable style, a combination of uncouth nativism and broadspeak, they can easily fill up books. Here is a selection of Borisov's most recent public statements, rendered verbatim:
Following the failure of Bulgaria's "short" parliament, which sat for less than a month, to fulfil its basic constitutional duty, form a functioning government, President Rumen Radev stepped in and appointed a caretaker administration. Though its main task is to organise the next general election, to be held on 11 July, the "caretaker" government is not as powerless as it seems. In fact, it can do everything a regular government is able to do save for actions – such as altering the state budget or concluding international treaties – that would require parliamentary approval.
Transparent elections will be possible only if Borisov's shadow state is dismantled.
Atanas Atanasov, Democrats for Strong Bulgaria
The criteria are problematic and should be revised. We are trying to create mechanisms to prevent this from happening in the future.
Atanas Pekanov, caretaker Deputy Prime Minister on the plan for Bulgaria's recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic prepared by Boyko Borisov's government
Most public opinion agencies got it wrong. Following a month of an exceptionally tepid (even in Bulgarian standards) election campaign, in which the coronavirus pandemic was hardly mentioned, Bulgarians went to the polls to elect their new parliament. The voter turnout was about 50 percent, which is about usual for Bulgarian elections. Bulgarians, contrary to what pollsters of all shapes and sizes had predicted, defied the coronavirus frenzy and went to cast their ballots in person, both in Bulgaria and abroad. They voted with their feet.
GERB are tired of ruling and the people are tired of being ruled by GERB.
Mihail Mikov, MP from BSP
Your mission is to revive parliamentary democracy in this country.
President Rumen Radev addresses the new parliament
PCR tests should be much cheaper, but this is what you get when healthcare becomes a business.
Professor Todor Kantardzhiev
We have ordered enough vaccines for two Bulgarias.
One of the topics debated in what was an exceptionally tepid election campaign was how Bulgarians abroad should be enabled to vote. Bulgarians, like the French and the Italians but unlike the Danes and the Irish, can vote in general elections regardless of their permanent place of abode.
No idea what the prime minister meant. Development of a Bulgarian Covid-19 vaccine is in its early stages.
Dr Angel Kunchev, Chief Health Inspector
A large facility indeed, but it will make veterinary vaccines... that have nothing to do with Covid-19.
Academic Bogdan Petrunov, immunologist
In Bulgaria freedom of speech is so free (sic) that it is incomparable to that in other countries.
Prime Minister Boyko Borisov
Some media try to represent the upcoming election as a titanic battle of a major anti-Communist, pro-democracy and pro-Western establishment (Boyko Borisov's GERB) and a renegade leftist party (BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party) that stems from the erstwhile Bulgarian Communist Party, the one that ruled Communist Bulgaria with an iron fist in 1944-1989. In fact, if opinion polls are anything to go by, GERB and BSP are almost equal in size, with the GERB sometimes emerging ahead by a few percentage points, and vice versa. Significantly, neither GERB nor the BSP are particularly large.
The picture, in oil, executed in the best (or worst) traditions of late Socialist Realism was immediately picked up by social media users. They were quick to come up with their own variants, ridiculing Bulgaria's Borisov whose authoritarian methods they claim increasingly resemble those of his Communist-era predecessors.
The Bulgarian Council of Ministers sent out a press release that the picture in question was one of a series of artworks commissioned by Arkad Engineering & Construction, the Saudi Arabian contractor for the pipeline project.
The peak of the pandmeic will come just ahead of the 4 April general election.
Chief State Health Inspector Angel Kunchev
The prime minister is a man who puts down all fires in Bulgaria.
Nasko Sirakov, owner of Levski football club, on his request for state funding of new construction on the club's stadium
The world looks different when one's onboard Boyko Borisov's 4WD.
