site.btaParliament Leader Finds It Much Better to Have Government Elected by National Assembly

"At present, it is far better for Bulgaria to have a government elected by the National Assembly rather than remain caught in a circle of elections and caretaker governments," Parliament Chair Nataliya Kiselova said in a bTV interview on Sunday.

Earlier in the day, the National Council of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) approved a proposal by the party's Executive Bureau to mandate the BSP-United Left parliamentary group to sign an agreement on the governance of Bulgaria with GERB-UDF and There Is Such a People, with an aim to set up a nationally responsible government.

Kiselova, who is affiliated with the BSP, said she did not take the floor during the party's National Council meeting, but when the matter was discussed in the parliamentary group, she spoke in favour of holding negotiations to form a regular government and against having another round of early elections.

Kiselova said the Socialists' National Council discussed a national governance agreement and a government structure and lineup. The plan is that each parliamentary group taking part in the government-forming negotiations should have a deputy prime minister in the future cabinet, she said. She believes that the cabinet should include at least two deputy prime ministers, and chances are that there will be three of them. In addition to nominating a deputy prime minister, BSP-United Left is proposing four other ministers, Kiselova added.

Asked whether the support for a cabinet with GERB-UDF will split the BSP-United Left Coalition, Kiselova said that the talks within the coalition continue at a Coalition Council meeting which began after the BSP National Council meeting on Sunday. The member parties of the coalition are considering whether to make efforts to form a regular government or to go for early parliamentary elections once more.

The discussions have been rather heated both in the BSP National Council and the BSP-United Left Coalition Council, but the Left has not given up criticizing the model of governance applied by GERB between 2009 and 2021, with interruptions, the Parliament leader said. According to her, the series of snap elections has shown that the parties are losing more and more votes.

It is up to the election-winning GERB-UDF Coalition to name the new prime minister, Kiselova said. They are the ones who will receive the first of three possible government-forming mandates from the President. The Left representatives in the negotiations firmly rejected the possibility to have GERB leader Boyko Borissov as prime minister, she added.

She commented on the expected support from the Democracy, Rights and Freedoms (DRF) parliamentary group, which said earlier in the day that they had met with the negotiating teams. Kiselova said the DRF's support is a possibility. She noted that the DRF do not want early elections, which is apparently the dividing line between the potential supporters and opponents of a future government. She put the chance of forming a regular cabinet at 50%.

Kiselova said she has assured President Rumen Radev that she would accept a possible invitation to serve as caretaker prime minister. The matter is not on the current agenda, she stressed.

BSP-United Left holds that an expired Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) is not supposed to elect a prosecutor general and a president of the Supreme Administrative Court, Kiselova said. That is why the parliamentary group voted in favour of the three bills to amend the Judicial Power Act on first reading. On Tuesday, the Constitutional and Legal Affairs Committee will start working on a single bill. Some MPs have proposed quite a few changes, which will probably delay the process, Kiselova said. She described the work on amending the Judicial Power Act as a race against time. She hopes that the report required for the second reading will be ready by Tuesday. She will then try to get it onto Wednesday's agenda of the legislature.

Kiselova's guess is that the SJC will elect Borislav Sarafov as prosecutor general and will propose to the President to appoint him. She noted, however, that the President is not bound by a deadline.