site.btaDOST Will Challenge Results of March 26 Parliamentary Elections

DOST Will Challenge
Results of March 26
Parliamentary Elections


Sofia, March 28 (BTA) - DOST will dispute the results of the elections of a 44th National Assembly, the party's Chairman Lyutvi Mestan said at a BTA-hosted news conference on Tuesday. The DOST Alliance received 2.86 per cent of the vote, less than the 4 per cent minimum required to qualify for the allocation of seats.

"The DOST Party does not acknowledge the elections held on March 26 as fair and transparent and does not recognize them as conducted in accordance with the Constitution and the election law," Mestan pointed out. In his opinion, the parliamentary elections were held in conditions of violating the voting rights of Bulgarian citizens.

"The votes gained by DOST would have been enough to enter parliament if a deliberately planned and aggressive campaign, or not just a campaign but rather anti-constitutional actions, were not launched against the party," Mestan said. "The entire State was harnessed against DOST: arrests and searches of party offices in Aytos, stopping buses, connivance with 'arrogators' at the border," he said. Mestan said that the 100,000 votes won by DOST were a "unique performance" for a six-months-old party and added that each one of these votes is a contribution to Bulgarian democracy. These votes "broke the monopoly of the MRF [Movement for Rights and Freedoms] in the ethnically mixed areas," he argued.

DOST has alerted the Prosecutor General, demanding an investigation of what happened at Bulgaria's border with Turkey where, Mestan argued, "political arrogators" used violence to prevent the exercise of the constitutional right to vote. Mestan wants United Patriots co-leaders Valeri Simeonov and Krassimir Karakachanov to be stripped of their immunity.

He was referring to several attempts by supporters of the nationalist United Patriots coalition to block the Bulgarian-Turkish border in the days before March 26 in a bid to minimize Turkey's influence on the election outcome, which they see as coming through Bulgarian immigrants being bussed to Bulgaria to vote in large numbers.

Mestan is suing Prof. Mihail Konstantinov for alleging that DOST were engaged in vote-buying.

The DOST leader categorically declared himself for the immediate conduct of new parliamentary elections. "With DOST and the right-wing parties absent from this parliament, any cabinet-forming option is absolutely unacceptable and will be dangerous," he argued. "DOST has a future, we will be represented in the next parliament by far more than 4 per cent," Mestan insisted.

In his opinion, a Grand National Assembly needs to be convened, and a new constitution needs to be adopted to reflect the new realities. He believes that a mixed election system will most probably prevail. PK/LG
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