“Bulgaria is not a poor country,” says Bulgaria’s new finance minister Assen Vassilev. It has until now simply been “brutally plundered”
Kiril Petkov, aged 41, and Assen Vassilev, aged 44, are the new prime minister and finance minister respectively, having earlier this year served in the country’s interim government. Both studied at Harvard Business School. Both became successful entrepreneurs after returning home. But that is not the only reason they are dubbed “the Harvards”. In 2008 they together opened a centre in Sofia affiliated to the school, offering courses on economic strategy and competitiveness.
Mr Petkov and Mr Vassilev were not widely known in Bulgaria until recently, but they are not political novices. Mr Vassilev was briefly minister for the economy in 2013. Mr Petkov has long been a champion of green causes and hit the news in 2018 when he flew to Nepal on a mission to find a missing Bulgarian mountaineer.
Ognyan Georgiev, editor of “Kapital Insights”, an online business publication, says the duo remind him of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s partnership in Britain during the 1990s. He says Mr Petkov is “energetic, outspoken, optimistic and wildly charismatic and wants to be the face of the whole thing”, whereas Mr Vassilev is the reserved, cerebral half of the duo.
Vessela Tcherneva of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, warns that the pair must act fast to achieve results, especially with their anti-corruption agenda, because the popularity that has come with being new and upbeat can quickly evaporate. The pair need to secure a prompt and impressive corruption conviction, she says, and that is easier said than done. The chief prosecutor, whom the incoming government cannot legally remove, is a man of the.
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