Bulgaria's Parliament has resumed business, and after the customary rhetoric from politicians that accompanied the occasion, now faces a number of issues of profound importance.

Among these issues is that during the session ahead, the next report from the European Commission will be released.

Normal debate on next year's Budget will start next month, and the legislature should finalise legislation to govern the parliamentary elections scheduled for some time during summer 2009.

The EC report will provide, no doubt, further fuel for the Government's detractors, and quite possibly the subject matter for yet another of the by-now familiar ritual of a vote of no confidence in the Cabinet. Ideally, it should be up to Parliament to fulfill its constitutional role in engaging with the executive to further good governance to meet the expectations of the EC.

However, in an atmosphere likely to be politically highly charged as the next elections come closer, constructive debate on these issues is a faint hope indeed.

On the question of legislation to govern next year's elections, it would be as well for those who produce laws to agree to set a long-term package of rules to govern elections, because it is inefficient to draft fresh - and often not always appropriate - legislation every time voters are called to the polls.

Perhaps the biggest issue is the Budget, and not only that, but also the question of how Budget surpluses are handled.

From the most recent meeting of the governing tripartite coalition council, it has emerged that framework decisions have been made about how the current Budget surplus should be used. It is one thing to consider the merits of the decisions made, for example, the scale of the amount of money to be spent, and the broad brushstrokes that we have seen about how it is to be spent. The split between social spending and what is being termed "investment spending" - an area troublingly lacking in specific detail - is naturally a matter for debate.

But moreover, a more profound issue is the process whereby decisions are made about the Budget surplus. First, it is one thing for the tripartite council, meant to be a policy body, to come up with very broad figures while others remain unclear. It should be a well-known principle that setting policy is meaningless unless specific numbers are attached to the implementation of that policy. Many will argue that budgeting in itself is the ultimate and overarching expression of policy.

Further, it is disappointing to see the extent to which Parliament is excluded from decision-making on the Budget surplus. Every year's Budget is in fact an act of the legislature, and should have its due status as a statute. Any question of the use of the Budget surplus should be included in the process of debate and voting in Parliament, and should not be the exclusive preserve of the executive, or for that matter, a political body that acts as the supreme and unaccountable body piloting the executive.

This coming political season will be a heady one. It is to be hoped that somewhere and sometime among the politicking, someone spends some time trying to improve the way that the country is run.