“Enthusiasm for our Presidency will help show up what Bulgaria is capable of”, said Meglena Kuneva, Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for European Affairs at a sitting of the Council for European Affairs giving the start to the preparations for this country’s EU Presidency in the last six months of 2018.

Bulgaria’s rotating Presidency of the EU was set down the moment the country joined the EU. This means Bulgaria will be hosting some of the European councils, informal meetings, sessions and other events. The summit meetings of the EU leaders will be presided over by Bulgaria’s Prime Minister. Meglena Kuneva admits that the financial plan for the Bulgarian presidency has not been drafted yet but explained that the expenses a country has to make during its presidency never fall below EUR 60 million. The 2015 national budget does not envisage any funding for Bulgaria’s preparation, so financing will be sought under operational programmes and the government’s Communication Strategy. Businesses will also be approached for providing financing for the country’s term, as is the case in other countries. To save money volunteers and university students will be recruited.

“At this stage the benefits cannot be expressed in figures,” Meglena Kuneva says. “Reputation is not measured in numbers. I would like to give one example – Latvia is expecting benefits from its current Presidency amounting to EUR 64.5 million. Gaining an international reputation and developing our administrative capacity, the funds invested in organizing events in the host country must not be seen as an expense and nothing else. If we are smart, we can have a three-fold return on our investments.”

According to Meglena Kuneva, the biggest expenses will be for training for the administration, as this is the country’s first presidency. She calculated that Bulgaria will need no less than 500 highly trained staff.

We are taking over the Presidency of the EU at a very special time, said Meglena Kuneva and added:

“The terms of the European Commission and of the European Parliament expire in 2019,” she says. “The most intensive period of legislative work will be in 2018 and 2019 and we shall be in the role of third party in the trio with Estonia and Great Britain that shall have to close many of the dossiers on the negotiating table. This requires a great deal of skill and is a veritable contest – how many of the dossiers you will be able to close. Ultimately, each presidency congratulates itself on the number of dossiers closed. Bulgaria’s Presidency will be focusing on: the negotiations on the multiannual financial framework for the next programming period after 2020 which is an instrument of political prioritization - it must be remembered that we have a Bulgarian European commissioner in charge of the budget - the preparations for a new EU strategy after 2020, active negotiations on the priorities and the political directions in the EU’s development after 2020 which we shall be conducting. Even though the European Commission declared there would be no enlargement of the EU in the five years to come, the accession negotiation processes with the candidate countries will continue. The focus will be on the Western Balkans and the preservation of their European prospects. The instability in the Middle East generates a powerful migratory pressure on Bulgaria and the whole of the EU. Stability and security are foundation stones in our development and drafting a new security strategy and a migration agenda are two integral elements of our efforts to build a stable and safe future for the EU. This can only be done with the clearly stated will of the entire EU. We have a vested interest in this and it is an objective we shall pursue. Developing a digital economy will be a priority our partners from the presidency trio will set down. To Bulgaria a digital economy will be a way to raise incomes and create more jobs,” says Deputy Prime Minister Meglena Kuneva, outlining the top priorities of Bulgaria’s future EU Presidency.

English Milena Daynova