Towards the end of his term of office and after declaring he would not be running for a second term, the President of Bulgaria Rosen Plevneliev made an impressive address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. At a session on the causes of migration, an EU anti-tax avoidance directive and unfair practices by chain stores on the domestic markets, the Bulgarian head of state spoke of the biggest political challenges facing Europe. His outspokenness impressed the President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz himself who called the speech “brave”.

And in truth, from the rostrum of European Parliament, President Plevneliev said:

“We are not in a time of a new Cold War, but we are rather in a time of Cold Peace...  Peace, because nobody wants a war, but Cold Peace because we see confrontation and methods from the Cold War time - propaganda wars, cyber-attacks, proxy and hybrid warfare… There are many crises. One of them is that today Russia doesn't support the principles of international order. The Kremlin is opposing us and is trying to destabilize the EU, by bringing mistrust to the very core of our project…  We are witnessing the worst security situation since the end of the Second World War. Are we heading towards a new Yalta Conference? If the West allows this, it will be a historic shame.”

Yet reactions to the presidential address in Bulgaria were few and far between and did not come from any official quarter - the response ranged from “too scathing on Russia” coming from the left wing to “a visionary speech on the future of Europe” from the right wing. For example, former Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Mihail Mikov called the president's speech “a short-sighted, shameful act of servitude to foreign interests, damaging to Bulgaria”. Krassimir Karakachanov, chairman of the VMRO nationalist party on his part said it was not normal or acceptable for the president of Bulgaria to be using language more scathing than the president of USA that Russia and Ukraine were but a thousand kilometers away and “we must keep the balance”. The right-wing Reformist Bloc however rejected this criticism stating that Russia was not in the focus of the presidential speech and that you really do have to be maliciously-minded to highlight just that part of the address. The ruling GERB party made it a point to note the approval the speech got at the European Parliament itself.

Among other things, in his speech Rosen Plevneliev called for unity and for keeping the sanctions against Russia in place. Some commented that after declaring he would not be running for a second term, the president is obviously feeling freer than Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, for example, of the need to make balanced statements on such tangled political issues. But the position of the president on the sanctions is not all that different from the position of the government. One day before the presidential speech in Strasbourg, Foreign Minister Daniel Mitov said in a televised interview that Moscow was an aggressor that by its all-out attack on Ukraine it had brutally violated the norms of international law and that for that reason the sanctions against Russia must stay in place.

A month ago the lower house of France's parliament recommended the lifting of the economic sanctions imposed on Russia, with Germany's Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban later following suit. The positions of the president and the government of Bulgaria on this painful issue may be very similar, but they are different from some positions voiced elsewhere in Europe.

The extraordinary outspokenness of the presidential address and the rostrum from which it was delivered also gave rise to another theory - that Rosen Plevneliev was paving his way to an international career after his term as president was over. Whether that is so or not is a subject for a different analysis.

English version: Milena Daynova