Last week the municipal councillors of the new composition of the local parliament took their oaths and at the second meeting yesterday the chairmen, deputy chairmen and members of the standing committees were elected.
Among those who will govern Burgas for the next four years there are many new faces, as well as not a few known for good or bad from their previous experience in government.
One of the returnees to local politics is Georgi Manev, who is well known in Burgas, although for the last four years he was not a municipal councillor and almost remained in the shadow of local political life.
After his election as a municipal councillor of the Conservative Union of the Right party he became active again and immediately after the first session of the local parliament he demanded the resignation of the regional governor Plamen Yanev. The reason for this was Yanev’s speech, which he said was a political statement and took away the legitimacy of the councillors, accusing them of being elected with a low turnout. However, he never managed to give an adequate answer as to what made this speech political and whether the fact of low voter turnout was not true.
Georgi Manev’s return to the political scene provoked the public, who recalled scandals from the recent past, in which he was the main actor. Readers of Iskra.bg sent us media publications from 2017, according to which Manev dared obscene remarks and insults against the citizens of Burgas, who protested against the construction of a cooperative just meters from the terraces of blocks 86, 87 and 88 in the „Slaveykov“ complex in Burgas.
Then, as a municipal councillor, he sided with the construction industry and even dared to tell the citizens to „f*ck it“ and accused them of being a „group of blackmailers“, even insisting that this be recorded in the minutes.
Such behaviour is certainly unbecoming of a councillor who, in taking the oath of office, states that he will be guided by the interest of the citizens.
Georgi Manev has yet to convince the people of Burgas that he has left behind his scandalous behaviour. Yesterday he was elected a member of two of the most important standing committees in the Municipal Council – „Municipal Property, Municipal Enterprises and Companies“ and „Spatial Planning“. The work of both is directly related to property and construction, which means that Manev will again be faced with cases in which he will have to decide whether to take the side of the aggrieved citizens he has to defend in his role as a politician.
Time will tell whether Mr. Manev will be guided by the interests of the citizens of Burgas or by someone else’s interests…
