On Monday at noon, showman Slavi Trifonov's TISP party returned the final, third exploratory mandate to form a cabinet in the 50th National Assembly, which means that Bulgaria will hold the seventh consecutive parliamentary elections (and ninth overall) since 2021 in October. Trifonov announced this himself on Facebook on Sunday afternoon.
He blamed yet another election on "Boyko Borissov's dependency on Delyan Peevski", with the latter demanding elections as soon as possible in order not to lose control over the MRF after his notorious split with the honorary chairman of the movement, Ahmed Dogan, in July.
Why did the negotiations fail?
Trifonov and TISP's decision followed five days of negotiations with the other parties, some of which shared their desire to form an expert cabinet. Despite these talks, which attracted tentative support from many of the independent deputies from the (Dogan loyalist) section of MRF and Velichie, as well as from BSP, none of the remaining larger parties (GERB and WCC-DB) agreed to this.
Still, TISP's decision to return the mandate so quickly is rather strange. The party had been seeking the third mandate even before the first was handed down. Unlike the first and second mandates, the third mandate has no time limit attached to it, whether fulfilled or not.
Therefore, expectations were for longer negotiations with more meetings, similar to the cabinet negotiations in 2005, when the MRF held the mandate for over a month and eventually managed to form a government led by BSP's Sergei Stanishev.
In his statement, Trifonov also blamed WCC-DB, whose representatives in the negotiations asked for time for a decision to be made by the ruling bodies in the individual parties, part of the grand coalition. However, the WCC-DB votes would not have been enough to form a government - such a government was only possible with GERB because Vazrazhdane also opposed it.
Political blockage
The parties once again showed that they work like connected but mutually blocking vessels. WCC-DB expressed reluctance to enter into a governing formula with Vazrazhdane's participation while the pro-Kremlin party of Kostadin Kostadinov said it does not want to participate in a majority with representatives of MRF, even if they are among those who left Peevski.
GERB's position remained the most undecipherable - it first asked for a minority government, hoping it would not pass, then asked for another election, and finally party representatives said the reason they would not support a third term was the presence of independent MPs in the majority. Overall, Boyko Borissov's party seems confused and defensive after what is happening with its main coalition partner - Delyan Peevski and his part of the MRF. The battle for the Turkish minority party is far from over.
TISP's decision suggests that the next elections will be on 12 October. Parliament goes on vacation from August 17 until the end of the month, which raises two questions - whether there will be enough time and votes to pass a law banning the current Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), dominated by Peevski cadres with expired powers, from electing a regular prosecutor general with a seven-year term; and whether parties outside Borissov and Peevski will replace Raya Nazaryan as speaker of the National Assembly. The purpose of the second action is to enable President Rumen Radev to appoint as caretaker prime minister someone other than Dimitar Glavchev, whose actions have been seen as subservient to the whims of Peevski.
On Monday at noon, showman Slavi Trifonov's TISP party returned the final, third exploratory mandate to form a cabinet in the 50th National Assembly, which means that Bulgaria will hold the seventh consecutive parliamentary elections (and ninth overall) since 2021 in October. Trifonov announced this himself on Facebook on Sunday afternoon.
He blamed yet another election on "Boyko Borissov's dependency on Delyan Peevski", with the latter demanding elections as soon as possible in order not to lose control over the MRF after his notorious split with the honorary chairman of the movement, Ahmed Dogan, in July.