January 19, 2009

The National Assembly chairman Georgi Pirinski said that the year 2009 was for the Bulgarian society one when it should draw the balance and reconsider the experience of the past 20 years and to make the choice of how the country should go ahead. This is a quotation from his opening speech at the colloquium in remembrance of the French president Francois Mitterand’s visit to Bulgaria, 20 years ago.

The chairman of the National Assembly noticed that the anniversary since the historic visit/breakfast of the French president Francois Mitterand on January 19, 1989 was the right moment for the rethinking and the reevaluating of the past. The visit marks the beginning of all the longings and aspirations which inspired all the Bulgarians, willing to see their country as a free, democratic and modern European state. Chairman Pirinski recalled the details of the event, which back then was held in the French Embassy in Sofia and has served as a powerful impulse for the imminent public figures in Bulgaria, committed to the cause of freedom, democracy and human rights. In their minds the figure of the French president was connected to the French Republic which had given to the World, two centuries earlier, the Declaration of the rights of Man and of the Citizen. He also reminded the fact that after the breakfast a meeting with students was held at the University of Sofia and that the spirit brought by these meetings had met a fecund soil in the face of the Bulgarian youth and society.

The colloquium was organized by the Embassy of France and was held at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Among the guests at the event, were the Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ivaylo Kalfin, the former French Minister of Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas, the Bulgarian ex minister of Foreign Affairs and present chairman of the parliamentary Committee on foreign affairs, Solomon Passy etc..