National Movement Simeon II (NMSII) leader and former prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg said that he was pleased with European Commission’s (EC) conclusion that Bulgaria would be ready to join the EU on January 1 2007.

On September 26, during a sitting of the European Parliament, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso confirmed that both Bulgaria and Romania would enter the union as provisionally scheduled.

Saxe-Coburg said that many institutions and all Bulgarians had struggled to achieve this result.

The EC report was objective, he said. The report showed that reforms in Bulgaria were moving along the right track, a NMSII press release said.

The three-year monitoring period should not bother Bulgaria as such monitoring was also applied to the countries that joined the union in 2004, Saxe-Coburg said.

All countries that entered the EU were subjected to some safeguard measures, he said.

Facts showed that EC treated Bulgaria the same way as it treated the 10 countries that joined the union in 2004, Saxe-Coburg said.