news from Bulgaria digest, June 2017

[metaphormorphosis]

When I'm not talking about the weather or video games, one of my favourite topics is my shitty country. Right now, it's too hot to play video games so I decided to make this write-up some friends were interested in, aka the Monthly What The Fuck Is Wrong With Bulgaria.

"The Business" is still treated as some amorphous divine entity. This month it declared an emergency for Bulgaria. This ambiguous wording means that Mr. Kiril Domuschiev said with great authority that economical growth cannot be achieved unless measures are taken to import labour as low birth rate and emigration have created a shortage of workers in the country. 

 

Meanwhile, Bulgaria still has the lowest wages in the EU according to the Annual Report on Bulgarian Economy and pretty much everyone else except The Business, whose opinion is this time voiced by BICA. BICA speaks of the necessity of abolishing minimum wage for a number of reasons illustrated with a very compelling powerpoint presentation. First of all, if minimum wage is increased to 510 BGN (unlikely, seeing as The Business -- again, BICA, along with three other organisations -- worked hard to have the court revoke this year's increase to 460) it will have doubled over the past four years, and will also be too close to the average wage in certain sectors, and besides will give no incentive to qualified workers to seek employment. The other argument is that if you compare minimum wage to GDP across the EU, actually our wages are the fifth highest. Or at least in "the golden mean" which shouldn't be a concept applicable to finance anyway. Personally I think the BICA is full of shit.

 

Still on this topic, according to a trade union poll, young people would not work in education for less than 1500 BGN monthly. As it is, the realistic wage is about a third of that, which is the number one reason less than 5% of school teachers are young people. Actually, back when I was applying for university, Pedagogy was the least desired programme.

 

And last but not least, despite promises of very strong tourist season for the seaside, labour is in shortage there too. With monthly wages of about 500-600 BGN for unskilled labour and 600-700 for eg reception work (yeah) it's hardly a surprise. Historically summer jobs at the seaside have been popular with students but more and more of them prefer to work abroad now. I wonder why.

 

Another story from the seaside, in the beginning of the month a Swedish tourist kicked a hotel maid unconscious, possibly dislocating her jaw (the news have been rather vague on the matter; the story was horribly covered with all news sites presenting the footage on auto play). The man was arrested, but possibly only after the security footage was leaked and spread in social media. However the one who took the brunt of public outrage was actually Mr. Blagoy Ragin, then-head of the Bulgarian Hotel and Restaurant Association. On air, he said (among other things) that Swedish tourists are very sensitive and considering how much business they bring to the country, perhaps we should be more considerate of them lest we lose them as clients. At a latter date he admitted that he was thinking as a businessman when he said that, though his initial response to critique (both online and off) was to insist the media twisted or manipulated his words somehow. Ragin resigned, probably under pressure from the Minister of Tourism; hopefully his replacement will think less like a businessman and more like a person, or at least know not to have live interviews "unprepared". 

 

Speaking of unprepared people, Desislava Radeva -- the President's wife -- was in the news again because of the "heated debate" of her homophobic facebook status. I have no more desire to translate it than I do the other articles I'm mentioning here so I'll just say it's largely a very typical "moderate" thinkpiece along the lines of "I have gay friends and we respect each other but there's no need to shove it in our faces right?, anyway I have nothing against gay people but why do they think they're such special snowflakes?!, and what about AIDS?!, and, of course, straight people are oppressed too why don't we make a straight pride then?" so, nothing unheard of. The issues here are that, first, that unfortunate text is published by none other than the First Lady of Bulgaria; and second, she posted it on the day of Sofia Pride, which is also the same day as the annual anti-pride parade (traditionally held at the same place and time as Pride, just in case people forget that they are definitely not being discriminated against -- in Mrs. Radeva's own words, at least not more than retirees). Still, according to media experts, Radeva's status is a non-issue because technically the Bulgarian President's wife is not officially a public figure, so she is entitled to her personal, unmoderated by PR teams opinions, just like any other private citizen.

 

And speaking of the President, June saw his aide Plamen Uzunov in a scandal over dressing up as Hitler, the third similar case since the elections in March. The President who firmly condemned this manner of flirting with nazism when the persons involved weren't part of his staff suddenly started speaking of the importance of context and intent. And like the two PM caught making the nazi salute on photo, Uzunov sees an issue merely with the photos being made public. Unlike the others, he didn't upload them to facebook himself and he will bring the matter to court. Personally I expect such news will continue surfacing considering the sort of people we have in politics right now.

 

Lastly, the case against Emilia Kovacheva, the midwife who almost killed a baby two years ago, is still ongoing. Typical delay tactics are being employed by her attorney and most appallingly they work: the hearing was postponed once again, though only by a week this time, because "due to the bad weather" the defence attorney was unable to get acquainted with the expert's report. More worrisome yet, for some reason the midwife is accused of attempted murder. Proving intent is likely going to be impossible so the parents' worries that she may get away are completely rational. Failing that, defence insists that it is impossible to prove that the woman beating the baby in the security camera recordings (which, at the time, were again shown on TV as well as autoplaying on news sites) is truly Kovacheva. Again, unfortunately, he is right, as we don't have the equipment and/or specialists necessary to unambiguously confirm the identity of the person in the recordings.

I assume nice things do happen time to time, they just don't make the news so there's no way to hear about them.