Behind an imposing wooden desk in Sofia, in a building that once housed a statue of Lenin, the man who chairs the group of 20 eurozone finance ministers chose his words carefully.
“I am strongly convinced that Bulgaria will join the Eurozone in 2025,” said Pascal Donahue. “The question is when your country will adopt the euro as its currency, not if.”
Pascal Donahue’s visit was aimed at rallying support for Bulgaria’s faltering bid to become the 21st country to use the euro, but it turned out to be ill-timed.
Experts and politicians who spoke to POLITICO are convinced that the target date of January 1, 2025 will not be met – not only because of the political turmoil in Bulgaria, but also because of constant inflation and the lack of public support, reports Tribune.bg.
“We are in the middle of a political crisis,” said Bulgarian socialist MEP Petar Vitanov. This would make it impossible” for the country to join the eurozone by the beginning of the year. “We really don’t know what the next government will be and whether this will be one of their priorities,” he said.
Even before the government fell, the country was signaling it might miss its planned entry date. Then-Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov said in January that the target was “not sacred”. Bulgaria originally intended to join the single currency in early 2024, but had to push that goal back a year early last year because it did not yet meet the criteria to join.
January 2026 “at the earliest” would be more realistic given the technical challenges of moving to a national currency, according to Cinzia Alcidi, senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank CEPS.
Bulgarian MEP Eva Maydel of the centre-right EPP said she was “optimistic about a 2025 accession date”, adding that “it could be January 1, it could be later”.
Before joining the eurozone, countries are assessed by the European Central Bank before EU finance ministers, MEPs and heads of government discuss the matter.
The “convergence criteria” a country must meet to qualify include having a stable exchange rate, meeting government deficit and debt ratio targets, and bringing national legislation into line with EU law. The next ECB report on Bulgaria, which will determine whether it is ready to join, is expected before the summer.
Inflation remains a problem. To join, Bulgaria needs an average of no more than 1.5 percentage points above the level of the three “best performing” EU countries. “The only obstacle for Bulgaria is the inflation criteria,” said Zholt Darvas, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel. The country’s current inflation forecast of 2.9 percent in 2025 could mean Bulgaria could join in 2026, Darvas said.
In theory, Sofia will request a new convergence report from the ECB by the end of this year, which will contain inflation low enough to allow it to join in mid-2025. But in practice, it is questionable whether this would be feasible.
Among Bulgaria’s political class, membership in the Eurozone is something desired. But the public is proving more difficult to convince. In a Eurobarometer survey last year, Bulgarians reported lower-than-average support for accession and higher-than-average concern about issues such as unfair pricing during the transition. Senior EU officials told POLITICO that Russian-sponsored disinformation is playing a role in the euro’s unpopularity.
But despite the EU’s continued public support for the January 2025 target, senior officials admit privately that it almost certainly won’t happen.
As one of them said, “It’s off.”
