In the Balkans, good news can sometimes be hard to find.
So why wouldn’t a deputy prime minister cut the ribbon at the unveiling of a toilet, or a cabinet minister christen an elevator?
They did, and they are not alone. The past few years have seen politicians in the Balkans plumb new depths in their search for a decent photo-op and a chance to take credit for the state’s largesse.
“It cost us around 30,000 lev, including these fine new toilets that I will be most pleased to show you now,” Bulgarian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the right-wing Nationalist Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria, Valeri Simeonov, told reporters during the unveiling of toilets at the Kalotina border crossing between Bulgaria and Serbia in November last year.
“They are new, thermo-panel, modern,” he said.
Simeonov, however, is a mere amateur compared to Bulgaria’s prime minister, Boyko Borissov, who has taken ribbon-cutting to his heart, usually in the company of a priest.
Borissov is well-known, and sometimes ridiculed, for his habit of inaugurating each and every newly-constructed stretch of highway in Bulgaria, a country not known for the quality of its roads.
Event of the year!
In Bosnia, where public officials often appear to outnumber ordinary people, the head of the Novo Sarajevo municipality, Nedzad Koldzo, in December last year launched into operation a rubbish bin, albeit a hi-tech bin for so-called e-waste, the first of its kind in that particular municipality.
In September 2017, the chair of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Dragan Covic, opened an electricity substation in the southern town of Citluk. A couple of months earlier, his Bosniak colleague, Bakir Izetbegovic, packed cookies at a factory in Velika Kladusa in northern Bosnia.
But it was the inauguration by politicians of a reconstructed stretch of pavement in front of the Bosnian presidency building in Sarajevo in 2016 that set social media alight, triggering an avalanche of satirical comments on Twitter and Facebook about the ‘event of the year’ just witnessed.
In Bosnia, officials last year unveiled a roundaboutin the town of Banovici and a traffic light in Doboj. Milorad Dodik and Zeljka Cvijanovic, the Bosnian Serb president and prime minister, attended a ceremony to open a renovated 205-metre tunnel.
In Croatia, few can match Zagreb mayor Milan Bandic’s scissor skills in launching festivals, pedestrian crossings, fountains and electric tricycles.
President Kolinda Grabar Kitarovic tries her best, opening a Maternity and Neonatal Department at a hospital in the Croatian town of Cakovec last month, accompanied by solemn guards and the national anthem. Croatia’s demographic challenge is one of the president’s most pressing concerns.
For more read the full of article at The Balkaninsight
