Radio Bulgaria

The standard of living of almost half of the Bulgarians has become worse for the past year. This is what data from an official national research, held by The National Center for Studying Public Opinion /NTzIOM/ shows. 61% of the surveyed people have declared that. People, aged from 50 to 59 years feel most affected. 70% of them have answered that the negative changes are too obvious. Every 4th Bulgarian expects the situation to get worse in the future. Only 5% of the interviewed men and women think that they have lived better for the past few months. While people expressed their fear of the global economic crisis in the research of NTzIOM a year ago, today many of them do feel the consequences of the crisis. Over half of the surveyed feared in March 2009 that they wouldn’t be able to pay their basic domestic expenses, such as central heating, water and electricity. One year later this is the reality for 56% of the participants in the survey – they face difficulties with paying these basic expenses. 22% of the surveyed said a year ago that they were afraid of how they would pay their credits. Today every 5th Bulgarian finds it difficult to pay the installments. People, aged from 30 to 59 years, along with private sector employees say they face the greatest difficulties. In March 2010 13% of the Bulgarians say they are temporally unemployed, while 16% determine themselves as constantly unemployed. One third of the young Bulgarians aged up to 39 years, express some sort of optimism for the years coming. According to the research the hopes are not for a quality leap of their standard of living, but more for “going up from the bottom”. The expectations for a better future are headed towards the government. The Bulgarians hope for urgent and effective anti-crisis measures. The work of the GERB government from the beginning of its mandate has been assessed to almost 4 out of 6. For the moment the approval of the government’s work is almost equal to its disapproval – 44% to 43%. According to the survey of NTzIOM this is because of the disapproval of the government’s policy in different branches, such as healthcare, social politics and finances.

Written by: Milka Dimitrova
English version: Zhivko Stanchev