Focus: Nabucco West: A Fateful Choice for Bulgaria

By June 28, an international business consortium in Baku will make a decision that could decide whether Bulgaria will become energy independent and prosperous or continue to be totally beholden for its energy to Putin, Gazprom and their Bulgarian pawns. Despite the crucial importance of the choice to be made in just a few days, the Bulgarian public, with very few exceptions, is deliberately kept in the dark about its vast economic implications and long-term strategic significance for our country’s future. This is not a coincidence but a conscious effort by the current Bulgarian government, all three coalition members of which are well-known for their overt or tacit pro-Russian policies and origins. Indeed, Russia’s keen interest in a negative outcome of the Nabucco West issue and active lobbying against it, to an extent could help explains the desperate effort of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) to cling to power at any cost as a minority government with the support of the malodorous neofascist Ataka party.