Bulgarian President Radev to hand second Cabinet mandate on August 20
Bulgarian President Roumen Radev will hold the formal ceremony at the Presidency in Sofia on August 20 to hand the second exploratory mandate to attempt to form a government to the National Assembly’s second-largest group, Boiko Borissov’s GERB-UDF coalition.
Borissov said last week that he would once again nominate Daniel Mitov to head a candidate cabinet, but instead of this going on to be put to the vote in Parliament, Mitov would immediately return the mandate to Radev.
Mitov, a former foreign minister, was GERB-UDF’s Prime Minister-designate after the April 2021 parliamentary election, in which the coalition won 75 out of 240 seats.
The other five parties and coalitions in that Parliament said that they would not support a new GERB government, a stance that did not change after the snap polls in July, meaning GERB-UDF would not even try to hold talks on support for its Cabinet.
The first attempt to form a government in the 46th National Assembly failed after cable television presenter Slavi Trifonov said his ITN party was withdrawing the nomination of the government his party had proposed just days before the investiture vote.
After GERB-UDF returns its mandate, attention will turn to the final attempt – under Bulgaria’s constitution, Radev can choose which party to hand the third mandate to, but the odds of success were low, given that both GERB-UDF and ITN, which have a combined 128 MPs, have said that they would not support any Cabinet nominated by the holder of the third mandate.
This would trigger the third parliamentary election in Bulgaria in 2021, likely to be held at the same time with presidential polls in early November. The date of presidential elections is expected to be set by Parliament in the coming days.
(Roumen Radev photo: president.bg)
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