The third year of Bulgaria’s European Union membership was supposed to calm the turbulence of the first 15 post-communist years and spawn a new vision for the development of the country. Having spent more than a decade fighting against the image of having been a Soviet satellite state, many hoped that as a member of both EU and NATO, Bulgaria would manage to emerge from under Russia’s shadow.

Deliberately or not, Moscow was quick to remind its former socialist subordinate that while in theory the two countries had drifted apart, in reality they had not.

From Russia with love
In an era when ideological contests have been replaced by the battle for economic influence, Bulgarians were delivered a bitter reminder of how dependent they still are on what happens in the Kremlin or in the offices of Russian gas giant Gazprom.

For 15 days in January 2009, Bulgaria was cut off from all of its natural gas supplies as a result of the Ukraine-Russian gas crisis. This plunged Bulgaria into one of its biggest economic downturns, causing a number of major plants to shut down production, and heating at residential and public buildings brought down to minimum levels amid the icy
grasp of winter.      

The fact that Bulgaria was completely dependent on Russian gas deliveries made it the hardest-hit victim of the crisis.

As the crisis unfolded, the media learned that Bulgarian authorities had been forewarned a few weeks earlier by Gazprom of a possible halt to supplies, but had taken no precautions. Ironically, the only excuse authorities could offer was that even had they wanted to take any measures, there was little that could have been done because of the lack of any alternative gas deliveries.

This meant that Bulgaria could rely only on its sole storage facility which could not last more than a few weeks. This said a lot about how little a succession of governments had done to free the country from Russia’s economic grip. As for the cost that the Bulgarian economy suffered because of the cutoff, estimated at hundreds of millions of euro, little has been said. If there was something positive about the gas crisis this was, as one commentator put it, "the end to illusions about preferential treatment of Bulgaria by Russia because of a history of closer ties".

The word from Brussels
Finally, after years spent on getting the country ready for EU membership, voices were raised that it was about time Bulgaria started acting like a fully-fledged EU member. Unfortunately, these voices were overshadowed by political clashes arising from the European Commission’s interim reports on the state of Bulgaria’s judiciary and the country’s capacity to absorb EU funds in a transparent way. The upshot was that almost the entire EU debate in Bulgaria was dominated by talk of corrupt officials and scandals in the judiciary, and milestone issues such as the Lisbon Treaty and the environment were sidelined.

At times it looked as if the centre of power in Bulgaria had moved from Sofia to Brussels, prompting some analysts to suggest that Bulgaria simply had substituted one authority (Moscow) with another (Brussels). Sergei Stanishev’s Bulgarian Socialist Party government did little to change this assumption, as almost all of his major moves, including Cabinet reshuffles, came as a result of EC reports. The sad result was that Bulgaria became an easy target of the foreign media every time they sought to caricature a class dunce to illustrate the shortcomings of the EU membership application procedure.  

All shall be taxed
One of the positive changes that 2009 has brought to Bulgarians’ minds – hopefully, anyway – was that everyone, no matter their social status, should pay their taxes. This notion resulted from the scandals which in February shook the country’s tax authority, the National Revenue Agency (NRA).
Never in the country’s recent history has a high-profile public employee been bashed by both the media and society with such vigour as in the case of NRA’s ousted head Maria Mourgina.

Mourgina was forced to resign because of allegations by the opposition that she had covered up VAT frauds. According to media reports, she had covered up for various business people who allegedly had used fake companies to drain millions of leva from the state budget (some media said that the sum added up to a billion leva) through VAT fraud schemes. Mourgina’s alleged role in the schemes was to "control" tax inspections of these companies. In some cases, some reports alleged, there was a list of companies that had managed to avoid being checked at all.

She was eventually accused of applying pressure on an NRA official, filing false data in her tax declaration, and abuse of power. Mourgina denies the allegations. A year later, the case against her has not led to any major results, other than her being succeeded by Krassimir Stefanov, who did something all former NRA heads had stayed away from: he opened the agency to the media and the public and went in pursuit of the taxes of everyone in Bulgaria, notwithstanding their social status.

These included prominent business people, football clubs and players, pop-folk and opera singers, artists and other popular figures. At the end of the year, he got Bulgarians’ sympathy by going after the still-outstanding taxes owed by promoters of the August 2009 Madonna concert in Sofia.

Off duty
What started at the end of 2008 as the first-ever protests by police officers against their poor working conditions and salaries continued at full speed in 2009. The peak of this unrest in the ranks of Bulgarian police officers, who by law are not allowed to take part in any public protests, was on March 15 when between 8000 and 10 000 off-duty police gathered in Sofia to protest again against their poor working conditions.

As part of the demonstration, they carried a coffin, symbolically burying the Interior Ministry, while organisers handed out red carnations. Some top state office-bearers, among them President Georgi Purvanov, were outraged that during the protest, a group of police officers started throwing their rank insignia to the ground in protest. Later, police claimed that these were outdated chevrons from the times of communism, but this did not soften public opinion that this time police officers might have gone too far.

As a result, the then-interior minister Mihail Mikov refused to meet police officers’ demands, simply saying that there were no funds for higher salaries.