site.btaSocialists Elect Campaign Team for Local Elections, Enlarge Party's Executive Bureau

Sofia, June 30 (BTA) - The National Council of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) elected a campaign team for this autumn's local elections and enlarged the party's decision-making Executive Bureau by seven members to 21, the BSP press office reported on Sunday.

The new Executive Bureau members are Asen Gagaouzov, Vessela Lecheva, Georgi Svilenski, Manol Genov, Milka Hristova, Nikolai Berievski and Stoyan Mirchev. The National Council removed Valeri Zhablyanov from the Bureau.

The 15-member campaign team is chaired by Kiril Dobrev.

Zhablyanov's removal from the Executive Bureau had been proposed by BSP Chair Kornelia Ninova. Zhablyanov said the stated reasons were: first, he did not prepare the report for the June 16 BSP congress well enough; second, the work of the BSP Ideological and Programmatic Development Committee has been less than satisfactory; and third, he was absent from a meeting of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe earlier in the outgoing week. Zhablyanov said the third reason was added artificially, simply to give more weight to a decision already made.

Approached by journalists before the BSP's National Council plenum, Zhablyanov predicted that he would likely be removed from the Executive Bureau (which eventually happened) because "the BSP has experienced profound and lasting changes over the last few months and critical thinking is being suppressed by all possible means." According to Zhablyanov, the policy of BSP leader Ninova "has deformed all internal control mechanisms in the party, and an authoritarian model of leadership is gradually taking shape." He said the BSP is a major party with a long tradition, and it is more than its leader.

Zhablyanov called for an ideological discussion inside the BSP to determine to what extent it is a leftist and socialist party. He also urged a rethinking of the Socialists' conduct as an opposition force. "What we view as 'opposition' today is obviously not what the Bulgarian citizens expect," he noted.

The National Council approved the BSP's financial report for the first half of 2019, an updated party budget for the rest of the year and a new organizational structure to accommodate an expected reduction of party subsidies in Bulgaria. MY/VE