Last year’s short-lived but intense furore left the impression that the debate whether Bulgaria should unilaterally adopt the euro was over. As it turns out, far from it.

Every major party (bar Ataka) set their sights on joining the eurozone by 2013 at the latest. Unlike his predecessor Plamen Oresharski, Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov has been pushing hard to get Bulgaria accepted into the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM-2), to the extent that some foreign diplomats, quoted by news agencies, said that he was being too pushy.

The plan now is to submit a formal application in January 2010. Formally, there are no technical obstacles to Bulgaria doing so, but it would bring the country a step closer to adopting the euro, for which there is no political will and plenty of arguments that Bulgaria is not ready, in terms of real convergence, even if it does meet all other euro adoption criteria.

Dyankov has not spoken about what the Bulgarian Cabinet planned to do if its application was turned down, but one economist in Sofia has the answer – go ahead and adopt the euro unilaterally.

Georgi Angelov’s argument is that a refusal to be allowed into ERM-2 would be a breach of Bulgaria’s European Union accession treaty and sufficient reason to disregard the European Central Bank’s decade-long tough stance on the issue of unilateral euroisation. Apparently, he is not alone in his opinion, but other economists polled by Dnevnik daily who support Bulgaria’s one-sided adoption of the euro were unwilling to go on the record saying so.

Much as the official switch to the euro would finally put to rest the fears of many Bulgarians, not entirely unfounded, that another depreciation of the currency would hurt their standard of living, must we go through the same argument again?

Boiko Borissov’s tough talk on fighting corruption has earned him the prime minister job, but without getting tangible results in that direction, the question marks will not go away.
Squandering what goodwill he has by challenging the EU institutions on an issue they feel strongly about is hardly the best way to improve the faltering relationship between Sofia and Brussels.

It is a situation that he is, without doubt, well aware of. As such, it was curious that Dyankov, again unlike Oresharski, did not move to quash the speculation.

On the face of it, the EU is flouting its own rules by not allowing Bulgaria into the ERM-2, but if one is going to keep score, the EU institutions have many more reasons to be unhappy with Bulgaria for not observing the rules than the other way round. With the judiciary monitoring mechanism still in place and hundreds of millions of euro in accession funds still to be allocated, Bulgaria playing hardball might not be the best idea.