MEP: EU Has Great Expectations for GERB Bulgarian Government

MEP Nadezhda Neynski has said the EU was watching closely the role of the nationalist party Ataka in the Bulgarian government. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria’s former Foreign Minister and current MEP, Nadezhda Neynski (Nadezhda Mihaylova), has stated the EU had great expectations for the government of the GERB party.

“There are big expectations for Bulgaria in Brussels. This is a plus because it has led to certain gestures towards Bulgaria but it is also a huge responsibility because if the expectations are not met, the reaction will be very serious,” said Neynski, who is more known as Nadezhda Mihaylova but has changed her name after remarrying recently.

She has told the Sega Daily that the EU institutions were trying to give the government of the GERB party the opportunity to demonstrate its abilities to carry out the reforms that the three-way coalition government failed to make.

Neynski has made it clear that Brussels had been scrutinizing the role of the nationalist “Ataka” party, which with its 21 MPs is the largest group support the government of Boyko Borisov outside of his party GERB.

In her words, the fact that the Borisov cabinet relies on the “unconditional” support of Ataka whereas the backing it gets from the rightist Blue Coalition was rather perplexing to the institutions in Brussels.

(Neynski herself is a representative of the Blue Coalition, which is made up of the UDF and the DSB; these two parties together with Borisov’s GERB are the three Bulgarian members of the European People’s Party.)

She has described the fact that Ataka was not formally in a coalition with GERB but was supporting its government as a “marriage of propriety” whose development was being watched closely by the EU.

Nadezhda Neynski (Mihaylova) was Bulgaria's Foreign Minister in the UDF government of Ivan Kostov in 1997-2001.

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