Bulgarian President Wants EU to Fund New Fence on Common Border With Turkey

The President of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, has said that his country wants the European Union to fund a new fence on the common border with Turkey, in order to tighten controls at this border.

However, the President also stressed that Bulgaria would not refuse the drones and radars offered by the European Commission in order to better protect the border with Turkey, SchengenVisaInfo.com reports.

The Bulgarian President’s comments came after a meeting held with the President of Hungary, Katalin Novak, regarding the issue, according to a Euractiv report.

“We have already sent to the European Commission (EC) the position of Bulgaria and the necessary financial plans to significantly improve the protection of the Bulgarian border. We propose to build a solid fence that will reduce to a minimum the possibility of illegal entry into the territory of the EU,” Radev pointed out in this regard, according to Euractiv.

The proposal that the European Union should support a new fence in the Bulgaria-Turkey border was first proposed by authorities in Austria.

Recently, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer proposed that the European Commission should allocate a total of 2 billion euros for a new fence along the Bulgaria-Turkey border. However, such an idea was rejected by the European Commissioner for Home Affairs, Ylva Johansson, while stressing that there are no funds for such a thing in the European Union budget.

She stressed that if the Commission allocates such an amount of money for walls and fences there is no money left for other things.

Authorities in Austria consider illegal migration among the most significant problems that authorities in Bulgaria need to work with. Besides, this issue led Austrian authorities to block the accession of both Bulgaria and Romania to the borderless area of Schengen on December 8, 2022.

Recently, the European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen said that the European Commission wants to strengthen the shared border between Bulgaria and Turkey with management capabilities.

She said that the Commission has a shared interest in strong external borders, adding that the most pressing issues at present are at the land border between Bulgaria and Turkey. She said that the Commission could provide infrastructure as well as equipment such as drones, radar as well as other means of surveillance.

According to Stockholm Center for Freedom, the shared border between both countries has already a total of 270-kilometre metal fence in order to stop asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to reach these territories in an unlawful way.

It was also reported that in November last year, authorities in Bulgaria deployed a total of 350 soldiers to the country’s border with Turkey in order to help police manage the increased number of migrants.