Recently, public opinion in Bulgaria has been drawn by news stories about two interconnected phenomena. The first one is positive – wages of hired individuals have been rising steadily and the average monthly salary in the country at the end of 2017 grew 10% year-on-year reaching 560 euro. Under European standards though this is a very low income and unsurprisingly Bulgaria is known across the continent as the country with the worst paid workers and employees.

The other phenomenon is more or less worrying and hard to explain. It is the constant growth of the number of officials employed by the public administration. Despite the ultimatums of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov for an urgent introduction of e-government, it has not stopped expanding and its senior officials have enjoyed better incomes than ever.

Currently the civil service employs 112,865 from the total of 3 million Bulgarians at work. In the course of one year, the number of civil servants and local government officials grew by 2287. At first glance it is not that much and so few bureaucrats cannot burden public finance. The exact picture however, becomes clear after analyzing the wages that bureaucrats are paid for services they render to citizens. And these services are not always of the highest quality. Currently the average monthly salary of civil servants is higher than the country’s average and stands at 600 euro, which is 7.4% more than a year earlier. However the civil service is not only numerous but also varying in terms of functions and responsibilities as well as in terms of remuneration paid for its socially useful work. This applies to the greatest extent where the senior officials of the administration are concerned. Their remuneration has been steadily rising nearing European wage levels and the affluent lifestyle of this elite often challenges European practices accepted as normal.

A telltale example in this regard includes cabinet ministers, MPs and other senior officials. The monthly gross salary paid to a member of the Bulgarian parliament is about 1800 euro. Adding the length-of-service allowances and fees paid for participation in parliamentary committees, for assistants and consultants brings the monthly salary of an MP to 3000 euro. The presidential one with allowances and fees included exceeds 6000 euro, and the salary of the prime minister stands at 3600 euro. At a cursory glance there is nothing flagrant about such salaries with a view to that the monthly salary of the French president is 15,000 euro a month, and the minimum for an MEP comes to 12,826 euro per month.

To gross remuneration however we should also add a few extras like an official car, accommodation, special free medical services at the Government Hospital, covered travel expenses, representative expenses etc.

The problems however assume their real dimensions against the background of the incomes of average people and above all, of the retired population. The minimum monthly salary in the country is 250 euro and the average pension is 165 euro. Without indulging in cheap populism we cannot but see the financial gap between ordinary Bulgarians and the bureaucratic elite. Things become even more irritating if we take a look at the remuneration paid to senior government officials who have not been elected by voters. The head of the not very popular and hardly visible Financial Supervision Commission for example is paid 7000 euro per month. And there are quite a few such commissions, agencies and committees receiving generous remuneration provided for by taxpayer money.

The affluence of the elite becomes even more irritating against the background of widespread corruption at higher levels of power. Whether senior public officials are so corrupt cannot be claimed accurately, because everything is done and kept in secret. But this is also the conviction of the European Commission and of most of the Bulgarian citizens.

It is no coincidence that since Bulgaria became member of the European Union in 2007, the country has been placed under special surveillance by the EC, which monitors very closely all measures aimed to fight corruption. It seems, however, that no particular success in this respect has been noticed by Brussels, given that monitoring has been going on for more than 10 years, and Bulgaria has been denied access to Schengen precisely with the argument of uncontrolled corruption.

Someone might claim that high civil service wages can act as a way to combat corruption among bureaucrats. It could be so, but there is no positive evidence, and there are no signs that it has diminished. All this causes the outrage of society, as opinion polls suggest startling levels of disapproval of public institutions and the government among voters.

English Daniela Konstantinova