Bulgarian President: ‘No easy task’ to get Parliament’s support for proposed Gabrovski cabinet
Bulgarian President Roumen Radev told GERB-UDF candidate prime minister Nikolai Gabrovski that no easy task lies ahead in seeking support in Parliament for the government nominated by Boiko Borissov’s coalition.
Radev was speaking on December 12 at a ceremony to receive from Gabrovski the list of proposed cabinet members, a week after Gabrovski received from Radev a mandate to seek to form a government.
Billed by GERB-UDF as an “expert” government, the list is a mixed bag of figures with backgrounds with the 2005/09 Bulgarian Socialist Party-Movement for Rights and Freedoms-National Movement for Stability and Progress tripartite coalition government, the 2017 Gerdzhikov caretaker government that Radev appointed, minor political figures with links to GERB, among others.
Radev’s office announced that he had issued the decree asking Parliament to vote on the proposed cabinet. Parliament has not announced when it will vote on the matter.
Kiril Petkov, co-leader of Parliament’s second-largest group, We Continue the Change, reiterated the party’s rejection of a government proposed by GERB-UDF.
In a post on Facebook after the candidate candidate ministers were announced, Petkov said that the proposed government “disguised as expert, is essentially a Borissov-Radev-Peevski cabinet”.
Petkov dismissed the proposed government as a facade behind which lay the desire for new elections. Bulgaria did not deserve this, he said.
“Bulgaria needs a responsible regular government to get the country out of the crisis and for it to continue to develop, for the people,” Petkov said.
Ahead of the meeting between Gabrovski and Radev, the leader of Parliament’s third-largest group, Mustafa Karadayi said that the Movement for Rights and Freedoms would decide on December 13 its stance on the proposed government.
The Vuzrazhdane party has said that it would not support a government proposed by GERB-UDF.
Bulgarian Socialist Party parliamentary group secretary Vyara Emilova told Nova Televizia on December 12: “We are not interested in the names in the proposed cabinet, because behind it the GERB model is visible – the ideology that the BSP has been fighting against for many years”.
“We will categorically not support a government with a GERB mandate,” Emilova said.
Democratic Bulgaria co-leader Atanas Atanassov said in a television interview this past weekend that GERB-UDF had to make up a shortfall of six votes to get its government elected.
Atanassov, whose coalition has said it will not support a government nominated by Borissov’s party, said that 115 votes in favour of the Gabrovski proposed cabinet had already been secured.
“We understand that this is being discussed, at a very high level. Namely, the mechanisms by which to ensure those six votes – either someone provides them, or someone is absent, we will monitor what is happening,” he said.
According to Atanassov, it was possible that the cabinet proposed by GERB-UDF would be voted into office.
GERB-UDF was “courting” Democratic Bulgaria in a bid to launder itself, Atanassov said.
Parliament’s smallest group, Stefan Yanev’s Bulgaria Ascending, left the door ajar.
Reacting to the December 12 announcement of the proposed government, Yanev said that Bulgaria Ascending had “always stated that the country needs a government and we will do whatever depends on us to have one – of course, under clear conditions and rules in advance”.
Yanev said that Bulgaria Ascending would discuss the proposed government and then take a decision.
(Photo of Gabrovski and Radev on December 12: president.bg)
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