Bulgaria awaits President’s decree of early election date
The final stage of attempting to get a government elected having formally failed, it is now in the hands of head of state President Roumen Radev to appoint a caretaker Prime Minister and decree a date for early parliamentary elections – which will be the seventh time in three years that Bulgarians elect a legislature.
On August 5, the National Assembly’s smallest parliamentary group, ITN, handed back to Radev the third and final mandate to seek to form a government, that he had conferred on them a week earlier.
Bulgaria currently has a caretaker Prime Minister, Dimitar Glavchev, on unpaid leave from his post as head of the Audit Chamber.
As amended in 2023, the constitution requires the head of state to choose a caretaker PM from a set list of public office-bearers.
The list includes the Speaker of the National Assembly, the governor and deputy governor of central Bulgarian National Bank, the head and deputy head of the Audit Chamber and the Ombudsman and Deputy Ombudsman.
Glavchev appointed Glavchev in April 2024 after all others on the list refused the post.
Since that time, Parliament has elected Raya Nazaryan, of Boiko Borissov’s GERB-UDF coalition, as its Speaker.
Nazaryan has said publicly that she does not want to be caretaker PM, but on August 5 Radev invited her to a meeting at the Presidency, which she attended, confirming to him that she did not want the job. Her view was that prominent political figures should not be in charge of the interim administration in the run-up to an election.
Radev said that he would contact the others on the list who had turned him down in April to establish whether this was still their stance.
Speaking at the ceremony at which ITN returned the mandate, Radev said that the solution to Bulgaria’s political crisis, which already had gone on for too long, was in the hands of the political parties.
“We all expect them to accept that the foundations of a successful governing coalition are forged not after the elections, but before them,” Radev said.
“The spiral of inconclusive elections continues to swirl, and this no longer only causes understandable irritation, but also unlocks destructive processes such as blocking of a number of institutions, alienation of citizens from the democratic mechanism of elections, and even doubts about parliamentarism as an effective form of functioning of the state,” he said.
Procedurally, Radev must issue two decrees, one appointing the caretaker PM and the other naming the election date. It is widely expected the latter will be either October 6 or 13. Traditionally, Bulgarians holds elections on Sundays.
(Photo: president.bg)
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