The opposition has granted the Government the strongest support for its policy a week after the latter was highly criticised for the same by the European Commission. The sixth no confidence motion filed against the Government in the past three years was probably the least interesting one although it had as grounds the freezing of about 800 million euro in funding to Bulgaria over lack of trust in Bulgaria’s ability to provide a transparent and reliable management of managing EU funds.

Losses of millions of euro over alleged corruption is something that every opposition in the world would embrace as the main focus of its policy against those in power. To give them credit it should be recorded that Bulgaria’s opposition did all that it could to exploit the situation, filing the motion hours after the EC said it was freezing the money for Bulgaria. Usually disunited, all leaders of the opposition were seen filing the motion and posing in front of TV cameras, doubtless looking towards 2009 when the country has its next elections.

The problem was that nothing else followed after the “family moment”. Instead people saw individual media stunts by each of the opposition leaders trying to head the “public discontent” that they claimed was just waiting to explode. There were no joint declarations and no statements of what they planned to do should the no confidence motion succeed.

Instead the media showed opposition politicians calling other opposition MPs to leave Parliament and so discredit the Government. Such politicians kept talking about people’s mistrust in the Government that had reached a level of desperation. The problem was that these people must have been all at the seaside enjoying their annual summer leave because the only people who responded to the opposition’s call for protests were the opposition MPs themselves. This was one of the reasons why Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev did not even bother to address MPs on July 29 when Parliament debated the no confidence motion. He did it the next day, minutes after Parliament rejected the motion with a solid support of 150 MPs against it and just 84 in favour.

The lack of public support made some cabinet ministers go even further and claim that the freezing of 800 million euro was not that big a problem because it would not affect ordinary people directly but – rather – companies with the record high budget surplus (accumulated by the same ordinary people), taking care of the latter. 

Others even claimed that there was not one iota of proof that EU funds had been embezzled and promised that the Government’s proposed action plan would solve all the problems by November, if not earlier. 

To all this the opposition’s only answer was to say that the Government was corrupt. Even the popular Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov did nothing else but show up on TV a couple of times and say that if he were assassinated it would be the Government’s fault.

The result of all this was the consolidation of the three parties in the ruling coalition who have never been seen more united. Just four months earlier the MPs of one of these parties abstained from voting in the fifth no confidence vote against the Government. Now, despite the clear message from abroad that the EC lacked confidence in Bulgaria as a correct and reliable EU member, Bulgaria’s opposition managed to turn the situation against them and give enough reasons to Stanishev to express his gratitude to Parliament for getting its support for a six consecutive time.