Bulgaria’s caretaker PM: European Commission candidate will be a woman
Bulgaria’s nominee to be its new European Commissioner will be a woman, caretaker Prime Minister Ognyan Gerdzhikov said on March 2.
Gerdzhikov, whose interim government has preparing for the March 26 early parliamentary elections as its main task, said a day earlier that his cabinet would not be announcing a nomination now, but did not rule out doing so after the elections if attempts to form a government proved a prolonged process.
There is a vacancy for a Bulgarian European Commissioner after Kristalina Georgieva left the commission on January 1.
There has been talk of the EC hoping that Bulgaria would nominate a woman candidate because of concerns about gender balance on the European Commission. When Georgieva was still a member of the Jean-Claude Juncker EC, nine of the 28 commissioners were women.
Gerdzhikov also commented on Juncker’s white book presentation about possible future scenarios for the future of EU, saying that he did not see Juncker’s document as about a two-speed Europe.
Bulgaria had never been in a leading position but “we cannot be in the backyard of Europe,” Gerdzhkov said.
On March 1, Bulgaria’s Deputy Prime Minister in charge of preparations for the country’s holding of the rotating presidency of the EU in 2018, Denitsa Zlateva, said that the idea of a two-, three- or more-speed Europe was totally unacceptable to Bulgaria.
Zlateva said that all state and government leaders in Bulgaria were firmly opposed to the division of Europe into a centre and a periphery.
/Politics
