Bulgarian Socialist Party executive bureau resigns, but not Ninova
Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Kornelia Ninova said on April 5 that the party’s entire executive bureau had resigned in the wake of the parliamentary election results, but she herself was not stepping down.
With ballots from 80.88 per cent of all voting precincts tallied, the Central Election Commission said that the BSP had 14.95 per cent, trailing in third place behind Slavi Trifonov’s party. This is lower than the party’s previous worst result at the October 2014 elections.
Ninova said that she was not resigning because she had been re-elected leader six months ago with a large majority, and resigning now would throw the party into three months of internal processes to elect a new one.
As soon as possible, a national council would be held to elect a new executive bureau, Ninova said.
She said that the BSP would not vote in favour of any government, expert or otherwise, nominated by Boiko Borissov’s GERB, and whether or not Borissov was Prime Minister in that government.
Ninova outlined a number of reasons that she said were behind the BSP’s poor result.
She said that most Bulgarians had voted against all parties that had been in the previous Parliament.
“We did not succeed to show ourselves as an opposition and an alternative,” she said.
Most Bulgarians had voted for “something new”, parties that had not been in Parliament before and that did not date from the transition from the communist era.
Ninova said that the Covid-19 crisis had lowered the BSP’s result, because the elderly among its electorate had been too scared to go out to vote.
She said that the bought and controlled vote in the April 4 election had been at an “unprecedented” level.
The BSP had lost votes to Maya Manolova’s formation and to that of Trifonov, she said.
According to Ninova, there were people in the BSP who had covertly worked for other parties.
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