European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso said on December 19 that Bulgaria had no other option but to comply and follow the rules and regulations of the EU. Barroso's statement came after he met with Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev in Brussels, which Stanishev visited briefly.

"The reform process must speed up rather than slow down. We need a consensus in Bulgaria that treats the fight against high-level corruption and organised crime as issues of national importance," Barroso told a joint news conference.

Barroso said that the EC would present a technical report on Bulgaria's progress in February, followed by a thorough and comprehensive assessment of the country's progress in the summer of 2009.

The EC stripped Sofia of 220 million euro not contracted before the deadline of the Phare pre-accession aid programme expired in November and said Bulgaria might lose another 340 million if it does not curb mismanagement and corruption. Should this trend continue, billions of EU structural funds allocated for the country until 2013 could also be in jeopardy. 

Barroso announced no new arrangement on the Bulgaria's blocked EU funds or on the future of the home affairs monitoring mechanism. Bulgarian media speculated in the days prior to the meeting that Stanishev would offer extending the monitoring mechanism, which expires at end-2009, with another year in exchange for the EC unfreezing some of the funding.

"We don't see yet the level of results we would like to see," Barroso said, effectively repeating the message coming from Brussels for more than a year now. Stanishev's weak reply was that his Cabinet was doing all it could and argued that its efforts "should be assessed fairly".

Prior to leaving for Brussels, Stanishev said he was going to demand stronger cooperation, a coherent framework with which Bulgaria can meet the Commission's requirements, and ultimately a fair treatment of Bulgaria by the EU institutions.

Barroso dismissed the implication of double standards, saying that Bulgaria was not a second-class member state, but emphasised it had to comply with the rules of the EU.