Bulgarian President may convene security consultative council on political crisis

Bulgarian President Rossen Plevneliev said on November 17 that he was considering convening a meeting of the Consultative Council on National Security to discuss the political crisis that has followed the resignation of Boiko Borissov’s government.

The council includes key cabinet interior, defence and finance ministers, security and intelligence chiefs, and the leaders of all parties represented in Parliament.

Plevneliev said that he was considering calling together the council after completing a round of political consultations with the eight parliamentary groups. These consultations are being held ahead of beginning the process of offering a succession of mandates to attempt to form a government.

If no elected government is formed, and there is no expectation that there will be, the next step is to appoint a caretaker government.

Plevneliev said that he wanted everyone – the political parties, the legislature and the executive – to agree on a way “to get out of the political crisis in which we find ourselves”.

Only after that would he start the constitutional procedure for offering mandates.

“First, is it possible, in the current National Assembly, to find another formula to form a government? Second, if this is not possible, what are the reasonable potential dates or time for elections? And third, what else should the National Assembly be doing?”.

He said that it was important, urgent and essential for the country to go to early parliamentary elections, if it comes to that.

Plevneliev met the leadership of GERB, the National Assembly’s largest group, Boiko Borissov and parliamentary group leader Tsvetan Tsvetanov, on November 17.

Before the start of the talks with the GERB leadership, the President said that he did not want the political crisis also to turn into a parliamentary crisis.

He said that on November 18, he would meet the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and in the course of next week, the remaining six parliamentary groups.

Plevneliev said that following the October 2014 early parliamentary elections, GERB’s leadership had accepted the responsibility to form a government, that Plevneliev said had achieved tangible results, including calming the situation in the country, strong economic progress, impressive macrofinancial stability, record-low unemployment and the launch of several modernisation projects.

Speaking after the talks with Plevneliev, Borissov said that he saw no possibility of accepting a mandate to seek to form a new government within the lifespan of the current Parliament.

Borissov repeated, as he has said several times in recent days, that he did not want his party to participate in the caretaker cabinet.

He said that Plevneliev and Roumen Radev – elected on November 13 to take office as Bulgaria’s president in January 2017 – should sit down and come up with the caretaker cabinet.

Borissov reiterated his call for the early elections to take place under rewritten electoral rules.

/Politics

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Clive Leviev-Sawyer

Clive Leviev-Sawyer is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Sofia Globe. He is the author of the book Bulgaria: Politics and Protests in the 21st Century (Riva Publishers, 2015), and co-author of the book Bulgarian Jews: Living History (The Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria 'Shalom', 2018). He is also the author of Power: A Political Novel, available via amazon.com, and, on the lighter side, Whiskers And Other Short Tales of Cats (2021), also available via Amazon. He has translated books and numerous texts from Bulgarian into English.