Bulgarian parliamentary elections: Central Election Commission announces seat distribution
Bulgaria’s Central Election Commission (CEC) announced on April 9 the seat distribution in the 45th National Assembly, with the full list of MPs set to be made public next week.
Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s GERB will have 75 MPs in the next Parliament, followed by ITN, the party formed around cable television presenter Slavi Trifonov, with 51 seats.
The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) won 43 seats and the predominantly ethnic Turk Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) – 30 seats.
Hristo Ivanov’s Democratic Bulgaria coalition will have 27 seats and the coalition between former ombudsman Maya Manolova and “The Poison Trio”, the organisers of the anti-government protests in summer 2020, won 14 seats.
For GERB, this is a drop from the 95 seats it won in the 2017 parliamentary elections. BSP will see the size of its parliamentary group cut in half, having won 80 seats four years earlier, although expulsions and defections reduced the number of its MPs to 69 by the end of the previous Parliament.
MRF was the only party represented in the 44th National Assembly that will have a larger parliamentary group in the next legislature, having won 26 seats at the 2017 elections.
CEC will finalise the list of MPs elected after candidates who were elected in more than one electoral district choose which one they will represent, while some candidates initially deemed elected may inform the commission that they did not want to take up their seats.
Borissov himself would be one such case, having said on April 8 that he notified the CEC that he would not take a seat in the next Parliament.
(Bulgarian National Assembly plenary hall. Photo: parliament.bg)
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