How much will Bulgaria have changed a year from now, in the closing days of 2009?

Around the middle of the year, Bulgarians will have been invited to the polls to vote, either separately or simultaneously, for a new National Assembly and for its representatives in the European Parliament. Opinion surveys, if they are to be believed, tell us that four parties will get into the National Assembly and therefore in play to be part of a governing coalition - Boiko Borissov's Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Ahmed Dogan's Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and Ataka. It is to be hoped that various serious potential promises will have been avoided, among them populist economic promises, and any conjuring up of the demons of ethnic tensions.

A new government a year from now will be presiding over a changed economy, with lower growth, increased unemployment, reduced foreign capital inflows, but also with a lower current account deficit, slowed credit growth and a reduced current account deficit. It is to be hoped that a sensible approach is taken to the fiscal surplus, one that is neither ill-advisedly restrictive nor too spendthrift.

The global economic crisis may not necessarily have an effect on Bulgaria's worsening demographics, but by December 2009 the problems elsewhere may have had an effect on the labour market as at least some Bulgarians return to the domestic workforce, in part because the less-than-welcoming attitude of some other EU states is likely to have become even firmer by then.

Perhaps a new government may be firmer about dismissing ministers and officials for under-performance, or perhaps not. Hopefully those who deserve their places on the grounds of merits will not fall victim to political purges.

The main items to check a year from now will be to see whether anything serious has been done about the use of EU funds, and whether the lesson of November 2008 has been learnt, that Brussels will not be beguiled by reams of paper plans; and most of all, whether anything truly effective has been done against organised crime and corruption. Or whether in regard to that, we shall have to wait another year on, or perhaps another few beyond.