site.btaDOST, Freedom and Dignity People's Party form DOST Alliance Coalition

DOST, Freedom and Dignity People's Party form DOST Alliance Coalition

Sofia, February 6 (BTA) - Lyutvi Mestan's DOST Party and Orhan Ismailov's Freedom and Dignity People's Party (FDPP) are forming a coalition called "DOST Alliance", Mestan said at a BTA-hosted news conference on Monday.

Ismailov said that the coalition will contest the March 26 parliamentary elections as a single entity.

Mestan said that the coalition is a purveyor of modern civic patriotism. "We boldly stand up for the sanctity of our identity: name, language, religion and culture, as well as the territorial integrity and sanctity of Bulgaria's borders, its unity and indivisibility," the DOST leader said. "Turkey does not fit the image of Bulgaria's historic arch-enemy because, apart from being a strategic partner in NATO, it is also a strategic resource for Bulgaria's development."

The coalition are confident that they will make it to the next parliament. "The DOST Alliance Parliamentary Group will be a new democratic asset that will be working for the preservation and development of Bulgaria's geostrategic value choice: to develop as a EU and NATO Member State," Mestan said.

He point out that the coalition agreement puts the two parties on an equal footing. "We will make decisions together," he stressed. "Our message is contained in the word 'alliance'," Ismailov added. In his words, the coalition was formed on a principled basis and as desired by the two parties' local chapters. He said that in the next parliament DOST Alliance will cooperate with the right-wing parties. "We would lend support to political forces and government formats that regard Bulgaria's continued EU and NATO membership as an overriding principle," Mestan pointed out.

He said that they will vie for the vote of all Bulgarian citizens who treasure the value of Euro-Atlanticism, as well as for the votes of emigrants in Turkey. "We are in for a very harsh, brutal clash between a political cause and political terror," Mestan said. "We trust that ideas will take the upper hand of repressions," he added.

He said that over the years the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) has turned into "an entity that erodes the democratic texture of Bulgarian society". "This battle seems unequal, but it will be won, ideas are winners," he argued.

Both parties in the new coalition have emerged as breakaways from the MRF. The FDPP was founded in December 2012 by Kassim Dal, the onetime second-in-command in the MRF after he was expelled from the Movement. Similarly, Mestan established DOST in 2016 after he was ousted as MRF leader. The FDPP recently left the right-wing Reformist Bloc with which it entered the previous parliament in 2014.