SOFIA, May 7 (Reuters) – Pro-Russian eurosceptic Rumen Radev promised on Thursday to bring down prices and restore stability in Bulgaria as he named a new cabinet after the president gave him the mandate to form a government after mass protests toppled the last one.
The former fighter pilot’s Progressive Bulgaria party won 44.6% of the vote in the parliamentary election on April 19, giving it a majority of seats in the 240-seat legislature.
Radev stepped down from Bulgaria’s largely ceremonial presidency in January to run in the election after protests over corruption and rising living costs forced out the previous government in December.
PB’s victory, the single biggest vote haul in a generation, will enable him to lead Bulgaria’s first single-party government in nearly three decades.
Velislava Petrova-Chamova and Galab Donev, who was the caretaker prime minister in 2022-2023, will take over as the foreign and finance ministers in the new cabinet, which will have to swiftly pass a new budget, set a debt ceiling to ensure payments for pensions and salaries and try to secure EU funds.
“We will reverse the trend of skyrocketing prices, restore stability with a new Supreme Judicial Council and its inspectorate,” Radev said.
“We will absorb the payments due to us under the Recovery and Resilience Plan,” Radev added, referring to hundreds of millions of euros withheld by the European Commission primarily due to delayed anti-corruption legislation and judicial reforms regarding the Prosecutor General.
Ratings agency Fitch said last month Radev’s plan to replace members of the Supreme Judicial Council, which chooses the chief prosecutor, would be an early test of his ability to implement domestic anti-corruption reforms.
It also pointed to the risk of rising energy prices due to the conflict in the Middle East weighing on growth.
The cabinet is expected to be approved by parliament on Friday.
Voters, analysts and diplomats are also waiting to see how pro-Russian a Radev government will be. In a final campaign rally, he displayed photos on a big screen of himself with world leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Radev’s party officials have dismissed fears of any extreme foreign policy turns.
(Reporting by Alex Lefkowitz, writing by Angeliki Koutantou and Daria Sito-Sucic; Editing by Alex Richardson, Peter Graff and Alison Williams)
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