site.btaPolitical Parties and NGOs Sign Fair Elections Agreement

Political Parties and NGOs Sign Fair Elections Agreement

Sofia, October 28 (BTA) - Parliamentary and non-parliamentary parties, NGOs and presidential candidates have signed a Fair Elections Agreement proposed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). The ruling GERB is the only entity excluded from the deal by default. Ten organizations signed the agreement on Friday and more are expected to do so until the presidential ballot on November 6, BSP Chair Kornelia Ninova told a news briefing in the National Assembly.

Ninova said the initiative was prompted by GERB's alleged practice to rig elections, pressure people, use the government administration for electoral purposes and pay for votes, as well as the latest amendments to the Election Code, which she said are unacceptable.

The BSP will commission observers and agents to do their own vote-counting in every region, she said. "We have law teams that can issue alerts about any legal violation and report it to the competent authorities. We will meet with the observers from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe who will come here and with other external observers to discuss ways to make sure that the elections are transparent and fair," Ninova explained.

The ABV party refused to sign the Fair Elections Agreement after the BSP declined a suggestion to have presidential candidates hold multilateral debates. ABV Deputy Floor Leader Mariana Todorova said that the Socialists wanted to drop the term "multilateral" from the clause about the debates, but the ABV disagreed, because this would imply debates only with the front-runner.

Todorova complained that presidential nominees are reluctant to hold discussions and express their views. "The front-runners are identified on the basis of hypotheses, such as opinion polls, and arrangements are made behind the scenes to get the front-runners to hold debates only between themselves, while the rest are relegated to Team B," Todorova said.

Ninova responded by saying that campaign debates cannot be covered by the Fair Elections Agreement, because the debate rules are set in the agreements between the political parties, the nominations committees and the news media.

The Reformist Bloc, too, refused to sign the agreement. Dimiter Delchev, Secretary of the Parliamentary Group of the Reformist Bloc, said the BSP has no moral right to push for fair elections, because "their hands are dirty." Ninova countered by saying that any evidence of "dirty hands" should be referred to the prosecution service. Ninova insisted that not a single lev from BSP's coffers has gone towards the campaign of Gen. Rumen Radev, the BSP-backed presidential candidate who has been technically proposed by a nomination committee, not the party itself.

The Reformist Bloc urged the National Audit Office to carry out a snap check on Gen. Radev's campaign funding. Delchev said: "We want the services to inspect the whole campaign of the BSP and to say whether the campaign is using funding from foreign sources, from foreign countries, such as Russia."

According to Delchev, public registers show that the nomination committee for Radev has raised 260,000 leva in funding, but the general's campaign has already cost much more, with 517,000 leva having been spent on 17 news media and more than 50,000 leva having gone towards campaign tours. "It is obvious that the BSP campaign is being funded by a black budget," Delchev argued, adding that there are actually 26 black budgets in various regions. He noted that political parties, legal entities and foreign institutions are barred by law from supporting the election campaigns of nomination committees. The Reformist Bloc suspects that money may have been given under the table in order to ensure that the interests of foreign countries are protected in Bulgaria.

The Bloc's Vili Lilkov said that Gen. Radev has received over 70,000 leva in compensation for unused leave from work, which practically means that his presidential campaign has been partly funded by the National Social Security Institute.