Bulgarian GERB’s Borissov sets deadline for new government in Sofia

3 months ago 12

Boyko Borissov, the leader of Bulgaria’s centre-right GERB party who won Bulgaria’s snap parliamentary elections last weekend, has given his future partners a one-week ultimatum to form a ruling coalition and elect a new government – or face another snap election.

“Either there will be an agreement on a government with GERB’s mandate next week, or there will be no government at all,” said Borissov, also a former prime minister.

GERB (EPP) won the elections with 24.7% of the vote and needs the partnership of the Turkish minority party Movements for Rights and Freedoms DPS (Renew Europe), which won 17.1% of the vote, and the populist ITN (NI), with 6.1%, to form a coalition government.

Borissov threatened his partners that if GERB did not receive support, the country’s political crisis would continue with another early election in 2024, which would be the seventh general election in Bulgaria in the last three years.

Political experts and sociologists warn that the political crisis in Bulgaria is so severe that pro-Russian President Rumen Radev has a huge chance of winning a majority in parliament if he decides to engage in party politics.

The constitution allows Radev to end his mandate as early as this year andparticipatet in elections if Borissov’s GERB party fails to form a government.

“Within this political development, there is a potential risk that Rumen Radev will totally change the electoral picture. New elections are simply not an option for the parties in the parliament,” Dimitar Ganev, a political scientist from the sociological agency Trend, told Euractiv Bulgaria.

Radev also supports Bulgaria’s membership in the EU and NATO but opposes military aid to Ukraine. He maintains very close ties with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, with whom he shares the same narrative on the Russian war in Ukraine.

(Krassen Nikolov | Euractiv.bg)