Budget 2026: adopted in month seven — what the numbers show — Parliament passed the 2026 budget on 24 July, 125 to 84, with five months left in the year. We test the contested claims against our own data: month-by-month cash execution, the text of every budget law since 2018, and the recorded votes. The 5.7% deficit is partly a choice — but about a third of what the official difference suggests, because the Fiscal Council never accepted that the earlier versions genuinely sat below 3%. And the calendar makes the ceiling hard to reach.
Machine-only voting: who wins and who loses — An interactive what-if on Bulgaria's own election data. Since 2021 every section records machine and paper votes separately — the same electorate split only by voting medium, which makes the split a natural experiment. We remove the paper ballot in every 'large' section (above a chosen threshold), recast its paper-voters onto that section's machine distribution, and watch national vote share and parliamentary seats recompute live. Sliders control the threshold (100/200/300/500 voters) and a turnout drop-off; the pattern is consistent — ГЕРБ and ДПС lose, ПП-ДБ gains.
Budget 2026 in focus: the record deficit, the critics, and a check against the numbers — The first regular budget of the Radev cabinet arrives with a 5.7%-of-GDP deficit and an excessive-deficit procedure just months after euro adoption. We line up the verified figures from the 2026 Budget Law and the 2026–2028 medium-term forecast, gather the reactions of politicians and economists (sourced line by line), and run the claims themselves through our budget simulator: the deficit, the €2,300 social-security cap and the party-subsidy cut all check out; 'you can't consolidate while debt explodes' is arithmetically false; and the 'soft' revenue and the 'Videnov-era' comparison do not survive scrutiny.
Following the public money: a citizen's toolkit for procurement — The expanded public-procurement module — set against АОП/ЦАИС ЕОП, SIGMA and the international tools (opentender.eu, DOZORRO, OCDS). An explainable Corruption Risk Index, money-flow diagrams, a politician scanner, a per-oblast choropleth and a red-flag feed — with worked examples of what you can actually find (single bidding, concentration, MP- and official-connected firms).
How the budget simulator works: data and model — How /budget/simulator works: where the data comes from and how the model is built. Static and dynamic mode, how every lever is scored (VAT, income tax, corporate, dividends, the social-security cap, excise, spending), the behavioral elasticities and fiscal multipliers behind dynamic mode, the limitations and the validation against official costings.
The BNB reserve after the euro: can it be spent? — A recurring promise: with the euro, Bulgaria "frees up" 20–40 billion leva of reserves it can finally spend. We trace the claim to source — how big the BNB reserve actually is (≈€42bn), what happened to it on 1 January 2026 (a ≈€1.48bn transfer to the ECB in exchange for a non-redeemable claim — an accounting swap, not a release), and why EU law (Art 123 TFEU) and basic accounting mean neither the state nor anyone else gets cash to spend.