Tariffs & Trade

In his articles and appearances, Kliment Robev treats tariffs as a political instrument with economic costs that are ultimately borne by consumers. As early as 2024, in “Europe’s battle – on the pitch and off it”, he examined the EU’s tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and warned of a trade war with no winners. After the US election he argued that a universal tariff of 10–20% would be a serious brake on the European economy, since trade with the US weighs more heavily in EU GDP than in American GDP.

In “An eye for an eye, a tariff for a tariff”, written in 2025, he explains that Donald Trump’s aim is not a trade war against the whole world but laying the groundwork for negotiations and a lower budget deficit. On television he has described tariffs as a “hidden tax”, a “boomerang” and “a political ploy with an economic alibi”, and he measures a country’s vulnerability not by the size of its exports to the US but by their weight in its GDP. In his view, the car industry and Germany are among the hardest hit.

He sees no short-term winner in a trade war, only a redistribution of capital and market share: world trade is fragmenting into blocs, and in the long run the most flexible countries and companies come out ahead. On the EU–US talks he judged that both sides were largely bluffing, as neither wanted a trade war. For Bulgaria he sees mainly indirect effects – and, should the conflict deepen, a possible opportunity as production relocates.