Borissov: Coalition partners will get ministries but GERB will not govern with BSP, MRF
Boiko Borissov says his GERB party will make the compromise in negotiations on a future government of other parties sharing responsibility by getting cabinet posts.
But the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms will not be involved in a GERB government, Borissov said on October 10 at his party’s first official news conference after the early parliamentary elections five days earlier.
Borissov awaited the Central Election Commission’s official announcement of the results of the election before holding the news conference.
He said that negotiations with all parties that won seats in the new Parliament, which are to begin on October 13, would be conducted in full light in front of the public.
These negotiations are to be conducted by Tsetska Tsacheva (whom Borissov also confirmed to be GERB’s nominee to be the next Speaker of Parliament, a role she had from 2009 to 2013), Roumyana Buchvarova and Menda Stoyanova.
Borissov said that he had given the three “full rights to make decisions on the spot”.
He used mathematics to say why the BSP could not be in a GERB coalition government, arguing that the BSP had emerged weaker after the elections and a GERB-BSP coalition would have only 123 out of 240 seats, which would not mean a stable government.
On the MRF, Borissov repeated that there was no single organisation in GERB that would support a coalition government involving the MRF.
“GERB will neither govern nor form a government with the MRF’s support,” Borissov said.
Of the Reformist Bloc, which has been caught up in internal differences on relations with GERB regarding coalition talks and which on October 9 came up with a “unified” negotiating position, Borissov said that the Reformist Bloc should know that there were limits to compromise.
Asked about the number of parties that would be required for the most stable government, Borissov declined to rule out any option before the first round of consultations that Tsacheva, Buchvarova and Stoyanova will conduct.
Borissov said that he was “not an optimist” about the coalition talks but his party would do all in its power to come up with a workable result.
He said that it was clear that GERB had won the elections with a result that was more than the sum of the votes won by the parties that ran second and third (the BSP and MRF).
This result, of more than a million people having voted for GERB, ended all claims that “someone was scared or was crushed”. This was an apparent reference by Borissov to the statements in 2013 by the then-leader of the BSP, Sergei Stanishev, that the BSP-government that took office at the time had meant the end of the “climate of fear” under the previous GERB rule.
Presenting GERB’s analysis of the election results, election campaign headquarters chief Tsvetan Tsvetanov said that GERB had won 25 out of 27 regional centres and had expanded its electoral base, notably among people older than 60, the traditional BSP electorate.
Tsvetanov said that no other party had achieved what GERB had done, getting more than a million people to vote for it in the past three elections. He added that GERB had won a landslide in voting abroad.
Tsvetanov and Borissov both referred to the need for reforms to the election legislation, with Tsvetanov describing the distribution of seats in Kyustendil and Yambol as unfair.
Borissov advocated going over fully to machine voting as a means against vote-buying. Asked his view on preferential voting, he said that he was not against it but many people did not know how to use it properly.
