site.btaNew Parliament Holds Inaugural Sitting

New Parliament Holds Inaugural Sitting

Sofia, October 27 (BTA) - Bulgaria's newly elected 43rd National
Assembly (Parliament) will have its inaugural sitting at 2 p.m.
on Monday. It will be opened by the doyen of the legislature,
71-year-old Stefan Danailov. President Rosen Plevneliev is
expected to give an address to the nation and its lawmakers.

The MPs, elected in the October 5 early parliamentary elections,
will be sworn in and will sign written oaths of office.
Statements are expected from each of the eight parliamentary
groups.

The National Assembly will elect its chairperson, who will then
preside over the remainder of the sitting and will give a
speech.

For the first time, one of the 240 lawmakers asked to leave her
parliamentary group and become an independent MP even before the
inauguration of the National Assembly. This is Anna Barakova, a
teacher in Bulgaria's second-largest city Plovdiv, who was
elected to Parliament on the ticket of the Bulgaria without
Censorship (BwC) party. Barakova says she has received threats
from people in her party who want her to give up her
parliamentary seat, because they say she won it by mistake. The
alleged mistake resulted from the fact that during the elections
her number on the party ticket was the same as the number of
her party on the mark-choice ballot papers. Barakova's departure
from the BwC group will reduce it to 14 members.

The youngest MP is the Ataka party's Kalina Balabanova, who was
born in 1990.