Friday, July 17, 2009

Vote for Kostov, you get Borisov...

Before the elections, a for me completley unknown party called Nova Zora (New Dawn) ,bought advertisements on Youtube, saying "If you vote for Borisov, you will get Kostov". Ivan Kostov is the leader of DSB, one of the leading parties within the Blue Coalition. He was also Bulgarias premier minister 1997-2001. He is a highly controversial person, a fact that this video tried to exploit to prevent people to vote for Borisov.

The video failed, as we all know, and GERB won 40% of the Bulgarian votes. Since minority government is not typical for Bulgarian politics, observers expected Borisov to seek coalition partners, and most expected these to be the blue coalition. After all it would be rather difficult to regain European confidence in Bulgarian politics with RZS or Ataka as coalition partners.

Since the elections negotiations have been going on. Eventually Borisov published memorandum that he wanted all parties except for the socialists and the turkosh DSP tio sign, to guarantee support in the parliament, but to form a GERB minority government, open for individuals from other parties in case they have special competencies.

Today Bulgarian media announce that the blue coalition as well as RZS refuse to sign any agreement with GERB, but  say that they will vote for proposals that go along with their politics in the parliament... (eh? Would they vote against them otherwise?) Ataka gladly signed GERB's memorandum, though...

This might not mean anything in real politics, since Borisov will be more careful with support form Brussels than from Ataka, and all parties will likely support anything else than BSP+DSP. But online the discussion is rather hot, see for example Dnevniks discussion about the news and I would guess that tensions are rising between GERB and the blue coalition. It is just a guess, though...

I would be a little sad if I had voted for the blue coalition. You vote for Kostov (and SDS's Martin Dimitrov) but get Borisov... personally I would prefer Kostov.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Yeah, well, I read the "memorandum"... GERB wants the others to sign this formal document just as a precaution and a sign that they are the leaders and the others will be the followers. This 3-page piece of paper listing general principles (that even BSP could sign if invited) offers no specific measures and basically I consider it somehow hasty and not well planned. The Blue Coalition is right to refuse signing such a ..."proforma" 'cause surely they will be "invoiced" for more. I voted BC and not GERB. I think that this move on BC's part is the right thing to do.

Maladets! said...

I also think the Blue Coalition did the right thing... The thing is that I don't get what GERB is trying to achieve with these memorandums. Even IF the Blue Coalition signed such a paper, they would have no reason to vote with GERB against their own voters interest.

Of course they are after parlimentary stability, which is a good thing, but I think the way to build that is through compromising wisely, and build trust between the parties.

And for treating Ataka and the Blue Coalition in the same way... it doesn't look serious to me.