Date named for Bulgaria’s WCC to get mandate to try to form a government
Bulgarian head of state President Roumen Radev will on January 3 hand a mandate to the National Assembly’s second-largest group, We Continue the Change (WCC), to seek to form a government, his office announced on December 29.
In line with Bulgaria’s constitution, WCC will have seven days to nominate a government or return the mandate unfulfilled.
On December 15, WCC – co-led by Kiril Petkov and Assen Vassilev – announced that former education minister Nikolai Denkov would be the party’s candidate Prime Minister.
The mandate-handing ceremony is set to take place just more than three months since Bulgaria held early parliamentary elections on October 2.
Boiko Borissov’s GERB-UDF coalition won the largest share of votes, thus entitling it to be the first to receive a mandate to seek to form a government. On December 14, Bulgaria’s National Assembly rejected the government nominated by GERB-UDF.
WCC has spoken of nominating a minority government. Denkov has held talks with Democratic Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Socialist Party and Bulgaria Ascending on a governance programme, though WCC is regarded as having insufficient support among parliamentary groups for getting its candidate government elected.
Should Parliament reject the government nominated by WCC, or if WCC decides not to nominate one, Radev must offer a third mandate to one of the smaller parliamentary groups. The constitution gives the head a state a free hand in choosing to which group to offer the third mandate.
Radev has said that he has stretched out the process of offering mandates so as to give the parliamentary groups time to reach an understanding on getting a government elected.
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