site.btaUPDATED Socialists Claim to Have Enough Grounds to Contest Election Results in Sofia

“These elections are not over for us,” said the leader of the Sofia chapter of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, Ivan Takov, at a press conference here on Monday. He added that his organization is currently conducting checks across voting sections. “We already have enough grounds to contest the final election results,” Takov said. “We will not allow the victory to be stolen,” he added.

The Socialists-led coalition’s Sofia mayoral candidate Vanya Grigorova said that they will fight for every vote cast in the local elections runoff on November 5. “We will fight for every single vote until the end because every citizen of Sofia is important to us,” she added.

“Hope is still alive and freedom is an arm's reach away, which means 3,000 to 5,000 votes,” Grigorova said, referring to the margin of a few thousand votes by which the mayoral candidate of Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) and Save Sofia, Vassil Terziev, won the Sofia mayoral elections. “We keep receiving alerts about gross interference in the election process,” she added.

Takov said that they are talking about contesting the election results and not nullifying them. “This morning, the Sofia City Municipal Commission came out with a decision on who the elected mayor is. We have one week to contest this decision and this is the first thing that we will do,” he added. 

“The figures, assuming that they are real, show that there is a twofold increase in the number of people who believed in us and supported us between the first and second round. The actual increase is probably larger,” Vanya Grigorova noted. She said that in the first round of the local elections, they managed to overpower one of the coalitions [referring to GERB's candidate for Sofia mayor Anton Hekimyan] in the assemblage [a word that has become a household name for the government of CC-DB and GERB-UDF] and were really close to overpowering the other part of the assemblage [referring to CC-DB's Vassil Terziev].

Grigorova said that despite all the resources CC-DB and GERB-UDF had mobilized against her, she leads in 13 of the 24 boroughs in Sofia. 

Asked whether she will head the Sofia Municipal Council, Grigorova said that this is not on the agenda. 

Taking a question whether she will join the future battle for the Socialists' leadership, she said that these were concerns expressed by her opponents who had stopped at nothing to compromise her cause. “I am not a member of the BSP and there is no way I will be elected as the BSP's leader,” Grigorova noted. “All those who worry about me heading the BSP should calm down. Sofia is what is on the agenda. We have to fight for the fairness of the elections here,” she added.

Grigorova said that she will become a municipal councilor. She added that she was the top-of-the-list candidate and would implement the programme, regardless of her capacity.