Bulgarian opposition parties to table no-confidence motion in January
The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the Movement for rights and Freedom (MRF), the two opposition parties in Bulgaria’s National Assembly, have reached an agreement on December 13 to table a no-confidence motion against the government of Prime Minister Boiko Borissov on January 17.
BSP leader Kornelia Ninova and her MRF counterpart Mustafa Karadaya said that the reason for the motion would be corruption.
Ninova said a working group composed of representatives from the two parties would draft the detailed motives of the motion and would have until January 10 2018 to do so.
The planned move by two of the three opposition parties in the Bulgarian Parliament will take place at the time when Bulgaria will already be holding the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Previously, it was expected that the motion would be tabled before the new year, in order to spare the country any blushes before it takes up the EU presidency for the first time since joining the bloc in 2007.
The leaders of the two parties said that tabling the motion before the end of the year would be “meaningless” and would fail to receive the exposure it “deserved”.
Ninova said that the choice of the date had nothing to do with the EU presidency and everything to do with the fact that January 10 was the first day of the next session of Parliament in the new year.
Karadaya said that corruption was endemic at all levels of government and it would be the working group’s task to document it as part of the process of drafting the motives for the motion.
Bulgaria’s government is backed by a coalition made up of Borissov’s centre-right party GERB and the United Patriots group of three nationalist parties. The two have 122 MPs in the 240-seat National Assembly, making the motion of no confidence highly unlikely to pass.
