site.btaPoliticians Note that President's Pick for PM-Designate Is Clearly Affiliated with GERB

President Rumen Radev's pick of National Audit Office President and former Parliament chair Dimitar Glavchev for prime minister-designate for a future caretaker government drew comments from politicians on Saturday.

Continue the Change (CC) co-leader Kiril Petkov said the President has chosen a highly recognizable political figure of GERB, the CC's partner in a troubled ruling coalition which has failed to complete a planned government rotation and has thus precipitated early parliamentary elections. Petkov spoke to journalists on his way to a CC meeting.

He said his party should not be represented by political figures in the future caretaker cabinet. He added that they will follow the appointment of ministers very closely.

Petkov noted that the main job of a caretaker government is to organize fair elections. According to him, the future ministers of interior and electronic governance will set the direction for the whole caretaker cabinet and will determine whether it will condone vote buying and other malpractices.

Outgoing Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov described Glavchev as a "clearly partisan figure, a member of the GERB nomenklatura". "We cannot pretend that he is not affiliated with GERB," Denkov told the media.

When a journalist recalled that CC and Democratic Bulgaria supported Glavchev's election as head of the National Audit Office, Denkov described the remark as provocative. He commented: "It is a fact that we have tried all the time to depoliticize these systems. Actually, if I am to put it in one sentence, the collapse of the government and the failure to carry out the rotation happened precisely because of our desire to put politically neutral figures in these institutions of control." Denkov argued that it is wrong to allocate party quotas when it comes to "the face and the substance of independent control authorities and regulators".

He shares Petkov's view that the caretaker ministers of interior and electronic governance will largely determine whether the snap parliamentary elections are fair.