site.btaCaretaker PM-Designate Grancharova Confers with Interior Minister Stoyanov

Starting consultations on the formation of a new caretaker cabinet, caretaker prime minister-designate Goritsa Grancharova-Kozhareva conferred here on Saturday with caretaker Interior Minister Kalin Stoyanov.

As he designated Bulgarian National Audit Office Vice-President Grancharova as his choice for interim PM on Friday, President Rumen Radev gave her until August 19 to come up with a proposal for a cabinet lineup.

"I was left with the feeling and apprehension that the future caretaker prime minister will come and is coming under enormous, I would even say brutal, political pressure to leave me out of the new caretaker cabinet lineup," Stoyanov commented to journalists, emerging from his session with Grancharova.

At her request, he briefed her on the Interior Ministry's performance over the last year. "I familiarized the caretaker PM with the Ministry's priorities, with our achievements within the space of a year, with the problems and their possible solutions, and outlined the road to which the Interior Ministry should stick so that we can complete the process of Bulgaria's Schengen accession," Stoyanov said. 

The Interior Minister said he had sensed that other people, too, may have been approached as eligible for his job. He assumed that another person may assume this office but declined to name names.

Stoyanov noted further that in recent days he had come under a severe attack and recalled that Continue the Change co-leader Kiril Petkov had personally invited him to join the Nikolay Denkov cabinet (in office June 2023 - April 2024). "Subsequently, he [Petkov] and his entourage, after finding out that I won't take orders by phone about particular appointments, realized that I'm not their man, and in the course of a year we have been witnessing daily attacks and demands for my resignation," he commented.

Stoyanov added that in recent days certain political leaders have been publicly seeking an interior minister who "would recover in some way the approximately 300,000 votes lost in the latest elections, but they can hardly find such an expert."

The reference was apparently to the Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria coalition. In the last two early parliamentary elections, they garnered 621,069 votes on April 2, 2023 and 307,849 votes on June 9, 2024.