GERB, MRF welcome elections statement by Stanishev
GERB is ready for elections, leader Boiko Borissov said on June 10 soon after Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Sergei Stanishev called for early parliamentary elections to be held in July.
Borissov, who underlined his calls for the government to resign after the BSP was soundly defeated in Bulgaria’s May 25 2014 European Parliament elections, said that account should be taken of the fact that it would be summer and people took days off, but his party would be ready for elections whenever the President declared the date.
President Rossen Plevneliev is to hold a special meeting on June 17 of the Consultative Council on National Security to discuss various pressing national issues, including political parties’ proposals for an election date.
Borissov added that he congratulated Stanishev on admitting that he had lost the elections, and also congratulated the anti-government protesters who had been insisting for a year that the government should resign.
The GERB leader said that he was “neither gloating nor glad” over the downfall of the government, “as the financial and economic state of the country is a disaster”.
Borissov enumerated the blows to the current government – the resounding defeat in the European Parliament elections, the European Commission refusing to accept Bulgaria’s Partnership Agreement for the next programme period, and the South Stream issue.
He said that a caretaker government would have to be supported for a month or two, “so that it starts to implement the urgent reforms which the European Commission has said for a secpnd time in a week have to be implemented”.
Lyutvi Mestan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – whose June 5 news conference calling for the resignation of the government and early elections was decisive in pushing the BSP to surrender to the inevitable – told a June 10 news conference that if the BSP had reached a final decision on the resignation of the cabinet, it was time for urgent consultations with President Plevneliev.
Mestan reiterated that the correct solution was early elections and now it was time for responsible discussions, and the natural place to conduct these was at the President’s office, he said.
