Bulgarian Parliament approves 2025 Budget Act at second reading
Bulgaria’s National Assembly finished passing the 2025 Budget Act at second reading after a 22-hour sitting that ended shortly before 7am on March 21.
This is the third time in four years that a draft Budget was submitted and passed after the start of the year, owing to the protracted government coalition talks that followed the October 2024 elections. Snap elections in both 2022 and 2023 also got in the way of the timely passage of the Budget package.
In another departure from established parliamentary practice, the debate was held on the state Budget bill as a whole, rather than sequentially, provision by provision. This resulted in a highly chaotic sitting, with MPs’ statements and proposals routinely jumping from one section of the bill to another, which prevented a coherent debate.
Parliament approved the bill largely without any of the amendments tabled between readings. One notable exception was the proposal by Delyan Peevski’s MRF-New Beginning group to set up a state-owned commercial company to operate a chain of shops selling goods only from Bulgarian producers, which was allocated 10 million leva as starting capital.
A much talked about proposal that did not pass was the one to keep a lower nine per cent value-added tax rate on restaurants, first introduced to help the sector recover from the Covid pandemic, as well as the proposal for a zero per cent VAT rate on bread.
The 2025 Budget package targets a deficit of three per cent, or 6.4 billion leva in real terms, with revenues of 90.3 billion leva and 96.7 billion leva in spending.
The economic growth target set in the Budget is 2.8 per cent and it sets the debt ceiling at 61.7 billion leva, with the government allowed to issue 18.9 billion leva in new debt this year.
MPs approved the separate social security and healthcare funds’ budget bills earlier in the week, following another long sitting that started on March 19 and ended in the early hours of March 30.
(Photo: parliament.bg)
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