Bulgarian Youth Fume on Facebook over Borisov's 'Potato Advice'

Some of the collages of the "Have You Planted Your Potatoes?" group on Facebook - portraying Borisov in Uncle Sam and Red Army officer reincarnations.

Bulgarian youth, many of them of leftist and rightist opposition orientation, have come up with a number of ways to ridicule Prime Minister Boyko Borisov's statement in which he advised Bulgarians to plant potatoes.

In late March, in a TV interview, when questioned about the deteriorating living standards in Bulgaria with the rising price of potatoes as an example, Borisov reacted by explaining that his family itself always grew its own potatoes, and never bought them on the market.

A Facebook group called "Have You Planted Your Potatoes?" has attracted some 500 members, who have come up with various collages ridiculing Borisov's potato advice in protest of what they see as ridiculous attitude on part of a prime minister.

Several youth groups affiliated with the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party and the rightist Union of Democratic Forces have staged various potato-theme protest initiatives around the country such as bringing a bad of vegetables to the Council of Ministers and a derogatory sign on the Bankya municipality, the Sofia quarter where Borisov resides.

This is the exact quote from Borisov's March interview on bTV (VIDEO in Bulgarian available HERE), which infuriated the opposition youth:

"You ask me about bread and potato prices. My family, for as long as I can remember, has never bought potatoes. We have always planted them and cultivated them, and we've never been to the vegetable store for potatoes. Neither my mother, nor my father, nor my grandmother, nor I. And I can tell you how to plant them if you don't know. There is so much fallow land in Bulgaria. Everybody can plant potatoes. My mother was a teacher, and she also went in the fields when she needed to support the family budget. Of course, I am talking in my personal capacity because you complain that the price of potatoes grew by 200%. Even if it goes up by 2000%, this does not affect mine and hundreds of thousands of other families."

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