Borissov renounces bid to be PM
Only a day after the largest parliamentary group, GERB, presented a proposal for governing the country that included its leader, Boyko Borissov, as prime minister and the co-chair of WCC-DB Atanas Atanasov, as parliamentary speaker, Borissov announced he was withdrawing his candidacy. He said he was "greatly relieved" to pull out because he did not want to lead "this broken country".
Borissov added that he would return the first exploratory mandate for forming a government as soon as he receives it. He would also refuse to support any other attempts to create a functioning cabinet under the second or third mandates. He also added that tomorrow, when the first session of the National Assembly resumes, his party will once again nominate Raya Nazaryan to be parliamentary speaker, as he sees no point in proposing an alternative.
Minutes after the press conference, the co-chair of WCC Kiril Petkov, interpreted Borissov's announcement as a refusal to distance GERB from its dependence on Delyan Peevski, leader of MRF-New Beginning who has been sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act for corruption.
Court to review election annulment requests
The Constitutional Court has unanimously agreed to review and consolidate into a single case five requests for the partial or full annulment of the elections for the 51st National Assembly. Expert analyses with varying tasks and deadlines have been commissioned, and a deadline is set for January 10th.
As part of the cases, the court has approved an expert examination to recount votes cast via paper ballots and machine voting in 1,777 polling stations. The goal is to verify whether the number of valid votes cast for candidate lists (parties, coalitions, or independent candidates) matches the figures recorded in the protocols of the respective polling station commissions.
Meanwhile, WCC-DB has proposed annulling votes from polling stations where irregularities have been found.
Mortgage numbers continue to rise
The annual growth in housing loans has accelerated further, approaching 27%. Despite the measures introduced by the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) at the start of October to cool the housing loan market, there is no visible slowdown in bank activity. On the contrary, monetary statistics reveal a monthly increase in loan portfolios of more than 500 million levs, pushing mortgage loans to a new record high topping 24 billion levs. The annual growth rate has also climbed slightly to 26.5%, compared to 25.9% in September.
This means that the increase in the housing loan segment over the past 12 months now exceeds 5 billion levs, whereas for the entirety of 2023, it was under 3.4 billion levs.
Borissov renounces bid to be PM
Only a day after the largest parliamentary group, GERB, presented a proposal for governing the country that included its leader, Boyko Borissov, as prime minister and the co-chair of WCC-DB Atanas Atanasov, as parliamentary speaker, Borissov announced he was withdrawing his candidacy. He said he was "greatly relieved" to pull out because he did not want to lead "this broken country".
