Bulgarian coalition government talks: United Patriots leaders arrive at GERB headquarters
The three leaders of Bulgaria’s nationalist coalition, the United Patriots, were seen arriving at the headquarters of Boiko Borissov’s GERB party on March 31, as talks on the formation of a government were to get underway.
Valeri Simeonov, Krassimir Karakachanov and Volen Siderov were seen going into the GERB offices in central Sofia.
GERB senior members involved in the negotiations are Lilyana Pavlova, Vladislav Goranov and Tomislav Donchev, all former cabinet ministers and who are seen as highly likely to be in a future, third, Borissov government.
A day earlier, Donchev said that there had been so far “conversations, not negotiations” on the formation of a coalition cabinet.
In Bulgaria’s March 26 2017 early parliamentary elections, Borissov’s centre-right party won 95 of the 240 seats in the National Assembly, the largest share of the vote but insufficient to govern without forming a coalition.
The United Patriots have 27 seats, which in combination with GERB would create a slim majority of 122. If Vesselin Mareshki’s Volya party is involved in a deal, that would add the party’s 12 MPs.
In an interview with public radio on March 30, Mareshki said that his party could participate in a coalition agreement only if it had seats in the cabinet, not just playing the role of lending support in the National Assembly.
Mareshki said that his statement earlier this week that he wanted to be Prime Minister did not concern the present, but the distant future.
(Archive photo: Siderov, Karakachanov and Simeonov)
/Politics
