Democratic Bulgaria quits support for mayoral candidate named State Security agent
The Democratic Bulgaria coalition announced on October 22 that it was withdrawing its support for a mayoral candidate exposed the same day as having worked for the country’s communist-era State Security secret service.
The Dossier Commission said that Ilko Zlatev, candidate to be mayor of the village of Benkovski in the Avren municipality, had been registered in September 1973 as an agent for State Security.
Zlatev, born in the town of Shoumen in May 1948, was registered as Agent Zlatev and then as Agent Sergey. He was employed in the Varna office of the Second Department of State Security, which was in charge of counterintelligence. Zlatev left the employ of State Security in 1990 – the end of the era of communist dictator Todor Zhivkov in Bulgaria.
Democratic Bulgaria has a clear and categorical position on the presence of State Security informers and agents and the communist regime’s services in the governance of the state and municipalities, in whatever position. They should not be allowed to take public and public posts, Democratic Bulgaria said.
The coalition said that all of its candidate mayors and municipal councillors had been asked to fill out a declaration saying that they had not worked for Bulgaria’s communist-era secret services.
It said that the time that the shadows and tentacles of State Security and communism should have been cast into the past had long past.”The mayors and municipal councillors of Democratic Bulgaria are the true guarantors of the clearing of local government,” it said.
The Dossier Commission announcement on October 22 named 137 candidate mayors as having worked for State Security. Candidate mayors included those nominated by Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s GERB party, the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party, ultra-nationalist coalition government minority partners the VMRO and NFSB, as well as the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which was founded by a State Security agent. Zlatev was the only mayoral candidate nominated by Democratic Bulgaria exposed as former State Security.
