Status: 11.08.2021 5:09 a.m.
One month after the new election, the new government should be confirmed in Bulgaria today. But election winner Trifonov jumped off at the last moment with his protest party ITN – and left chaos.
Slawi Trifonov, a popular television presenter and head of the young protest party “There is such a people” (ITN), dropped the political bomb on his own TV channel. He will not present his team for a minority government to parliament for election. He will submit “no cabinet at all” to the MPs for a vote.
The reason: The two other protest and civil rights parties, who also demanded the resignation of the then Prime Minister Boyko Borissov at the mass demonstrations in summer 2020, are “traitors”. They would not have wanted to support his minority government. “That means that we are going to new elections because we as the first political force in the current parliament will neither support the parties of the status quo for the next cabinet, nor ‘Democratic Bulgaria’ or ‘Stand up, Bulgaria! We are coming!'”
From the start, party founder Trifonov rejected the formation of a coalition government. He insisted on setting up a minority government with the 65 members of his party in the 240-seat parliament.
Amazing procedure after the election
Just one day after the elections, Trifonov astonished the other parties and the population by presenting a complete team for a minority government that the other parties were supposed to support before the final election results were available. This was not particularly well received by the two smaller civil rights parties. “Democratic Bulgaria” and “Get up Bulgaria!” moved away from Trifonov.
Hristo Ivanov, the head of “Democratic Bulgaria”, accused Trifonov of irresponsibility because he forced the other parties to agree – according to the motto: “Either it goes as I say or nothing happens”. “And today there is no way we can afford to betray our voters – the voters who demanded and protested by supporting a government that we cannot call a government of change.”
Enhanced résumé of the proposed head of government
Trifonov did not run for parliament and also refused to become head of government. For the highest government post he had proposed the 44-year-old Plamen Nikolov, who until recently was the manager of a company specializing in swimming equipment and has been in parliament since April.
Nikolov had caused a stir in the past few days with an abrupt change in his résumé. For example, he had claimed on the LinkedIn platform until August 1 – two days after he had received the order to form a government from President Rumen Radew – that he had been a doctoral student at the University of Klagenfurt from 2001 to 2004. That was out of the question the university announced on request. “This is not true.” Nikolov was never enrolled at the University of Klagenfurt.
A stalemate
After Trifonov’s rejection, President Radev will, according to the constitution, give the second largest faction in parliament the mandate to form a government, the right-wing GERB party of ex-Prime Minister Boiko Borissow. But Borisov had already announced that this mandate would be returned immediately. None of the other parties want to form a coalition with him.
Opinion polls, however, do not indicate that if another election were to take place, there would be any major change in the domestic political balance of power. Parvan Simeonov, political scientist and managing director of the polling institute Gallup International in Sofia: “The protest parties overlook the simple fact that there is a strong desire for change in Bulgarian society, but still a firmly entrenched status quo. Nowhere do we have super clean people who do this Suddenly sweeping the status quo away. “