I have been seeing this debated over and over again on several discussions and articles, plus in this morning's article. The discussion seems to be a very Romanian-like type of perspective, without any constructive outcome out of it. 

Why would we care in the first place about Bulgaria? How its evolution or involution would solve our problems anyway? If Bulgaria is the benchmark, why do we bother to adopt all EU legislation? If Bulgaria is our competitor why not choose it as one and behave accordingly? Why Bulgaria and not Albania, or Hungary?

The answer to all these is close to a very popular Romanian saying about waiting for the death of the neighbor so that we'd take possesion of his goat. Bulgaria used to be just a scapegoat in some of the EU circumstances both for most politicians failures/success and for more journalists stories. Most of Romanians perceive them as being at a level behind us from many perspectives - especially economical and I guess all our frustrations from the internal failures and problems were somehow ameliorated by seeing that these folks around were doing worse. And this is wrong!! 

"It is not only the image that makes the difference here" says in the article, it is more. Guess what, of course it is more, we're behind, if we were in competition, then they have already started to take the lead. We'd better take them in sight since they seem to have understood better than us the importance of the moment and fulfilling or snicking around all the EU-related requirments, even though in a Balcanic way. Keeping an eye on them and just complaining or inferring "look at these guys, we're better than them, but somehow they're perceived otherwise" will not do any good. But looking at them and learning from their lessons seems to be a more appropriate strategy. And I think this should start not only from the top level, but also from the society level -- especially from the voice-makers.