site.btaMRF Starts Consultations with Other Parliamentary Parties on Election Rules Referendum

MRF Starts Consultations with Other Parliamentary Parties on Election Rules Referendum

Sofia, June 19 (BTA) - The Movement for Rights and Freedoms
(MRF) on Friday started consultations with the other
parliamentary parties on a planned referendum on election rules.
 Emerging from the first round of talks, MRF Chairman Lyutvi
Mestan said the idea is to achieve broad political consensus on
the future changes in the election system. "We need to be clear
about the consequences for Bulgarian democracy," Mestan said.

In the first meeting, Mestan talked with Reformist Bloc Co-Floor
 Leaders Radan Kanev and Naiden Zelenogorski. The Bloc remained
adamant that voting preferences should be open, meaning that
there should be no threshold.

Mestan said that MRF will not accept a mixed voting system; it
should be either a proportional representation system or a
majority voting system, nothing in-between. If the other parties
 are not happy with the current proportional representation
system, MRF will insist on a referendum on introducing a "100
per cent majority voting system," which is different from the
idea of having only part of the MPs elected by majority voting,
as suggested by the parliamentary majority and by President
Rosen Plevneliev. MRF's radical counterproposal is aimed at
getting all those who want majority voting "to drink the whole
bitter cup of populism and bear the consequences," Mestan said.

He gave figures which show that a mixed voting system would give
 the ruling GERB party an absolute majority in Parliament, which
 is an unlikely achievement with the current proportional
representation system. "This practically means that an entity
which has not won a majority will be able to form a one-party
government," he said.

Mestan noted that during Friday's meeting the Reformist Bloc
criticized the idea of majority voting, using the same arguments
 that Mestan himself employed in earlier years.

Reformist Bloc Co-Floor Leader Radan Kanev said that his
coalition will propose a new version of the referendum question
about majority voting. The Bloc's version would ask Bulgarians
whether they want the majority-voting element of the system to
be enhanced while the system remains basically a
proportional-representation one.

Kanev admitted that the Reformist Bloc and MRF are as wide apart
 in their views as they were before the meeting. "We believe
that a 100 per cent majority voting system would completely
distort the Bulgarian political system," he warned. The Bloc
also sees other flaws in MRF's idea. "From the perspective of
their own political interests, MRF apparently imagine that there
 will be a single round of voting [under a majority voting
system], whereas we are thinking of two rounds," Kanev said.
According to him, the Reformist Bloc's proposal about
threshold-free voting preferences would ensure absolute
majoritarianism in a proportionate representation system.