Smallest party in Bulgaria’s Parliament ends ‘boycott’
Six days after the smallest party in Bulgaria’s National Assembly announced that it was withdrawing from sittings, it ended the “boycott” after talks with Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s GERB party.
Vesselin Mareshki’s populist Volya party, which has 12 out of 240 MPs, announced the boycott on March 14, without stating its reasons. The following day, Mareshki said that Volya would attend sittings, to provide a quorum, and it would take part in “important” votes.
Mareshki asked to meet GERB on March 20, saying that he wanted to hear about their governance programme.
Emerging from the meeting, Mareshki announced himself to be “very impressed” with the programme.
“This was very important to us, because not knowing their program so well and not knowing the performance report, we could take unjustified decisions that would ultimately harm the state,” Mareshki said.
Borissov’s third coalition government has been in office for two months short of two years.
Tsvetan Tsvetanov, leader of the GERB parliamentary group, said that the party wanted to have a “working, constructive dialogue with all the parliamentary forces”.
A boycott of the National Assembly by the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party, the second-largest group with 78 MPs, continues.
