Bulgaria’s Reformist Bloc in talks on widening anti-government protests
Bulgaria’s opposition Reformist Bloc, a group of right-wing and centrist parties currently without representation in Parliament, has held talks with student protest groups on a united front of protests to bring down the highly unpopular Bulgarian Socialist Party government.
The talks followed a second and short-lived occupation by a group of students of Sofia University’s central campus to demand the resignation of the government.
Bulgaria has seen many months of consecutive daily protests against the BSP government, protests that first were sparked by public outrage at the appointment of media mogul Delyan Peevski, a Movement for Rights and Freedoms MP, to head the State Agency for National Security.
In recent months, turnout at nightly public protests has dwindled substantially, but polls – even by opinion survey agencies that tend to produce results in line with the outlook of the ruling axis – continue to show the vast majority of Bulgarians support demands for the government to resign and for fresh parliamentary elections to be held.
Radan Kanev, a leader of the Reformist Bloc, said that if the current government did not resign by March 15 to enable national parliamentary elections to be held on May 25 simultaneously with Bulgaria’s scheduled European Parliament elections, the EP elections should be regarded as a referendum on whether the current government should go.
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(Photo, of Bulgarian anti-government protest representatives at their January 28 meeting in Brussels: Noresharski.com)
