Court of Justice of the EU Has Rejected Requests to Temporarily Suspend Bulgaria’s Introduction of the Euro

The Court of Justice of the European Union has rejected two requests for the temporary suspension of Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro from 1 January 2026.

In both cases, the applicants challenged acts of the Council of the European Union governing Bulgaria’s entry into the eurozone and sought to have them suspended until a final ruling on the substance of the case.

The requests included calls to halt the effects of the decisions introducing the euro, and in one instance to suspend all legal consequences of those decisions in Bulgaria. This would have included the automatic conversion of money, contracts and financial obligations.

The Court recalls that in order to allow such measures, several conditions must be met. First, the request must appear at first sight to be legally justified. Secondly, there must be urgency, that is to say, a risk of substantial and irreparable harm if the measures are not adopted immediately. Thirdly, the application must contain a clear, precise and independent statement of the facts and the legal grounds, without the court having to consult other documents.

These conditions are cumulative, meaning that the absence of even one of them is sufficient for the request to be rejected.

In both rulings, the President of the General Court dismissed the applications for interim measures as inadmissible. This means the Court did not examine the substance of the claims, as the applications themselves failed to meet the required formal and substantive criteria.

The Court found that the applicants had not provided sufficiently specific and evidence-based arguments regarding urgency — in other words, they failed to demonstrate a risk of serious and irreparable harm. In one of the cases, there was also insufficient explanation to assess whether the request appeared, at first sight, to be well-founded.

Furthermore, the claims presented were considered too general and lacking in specific facts or supporting evidence. The applications were not self-contained, as they relied on references to other documents.

As a result, the practical outcome of the Court’s decision is that the Council of the EU’s acts concerning Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro remain in force.