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| Europe | ||
| Bulgaria election sets up stalemate | ||
| 2013-05-13 | ||
Three months after the biggest demonstrations in years prompted the former bodyguard to tender his government's resignation, Borisov's GERB party won between 30.4 and 34 percent of the vote, the exit polls showed. In second place was the socialist BSP party on between 25.3 and 27.1 percent, followed by the Turkish minority party MRF on 10-11.5 percent and the ultra-nationalist Ataka on 7.3-8.6 percent. It remained unclear yet if a fifth party would pass the 4.0 percent threshold to win seats in the legislature in the European Union's poorest country. The tight vote also made it impossible for pollsters to say if GERB could muster a slim majority together with Ataka -- which used to back their previous majority cabinet but turned against them as the vote drew near. "There is no way for Ataka to back GERB," snapped Ataka's flamboyant leader Volen Siderov late Sunday. "Bulgaria needs stability and if parties are responsible they should back even a minority cabinet," GERB's campaign manager and ex-interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said. The Socialists and their previous coalition partner MRF were also just short of majority in the 240-seat parliament, the exit polls suggested. BSP have earlier said they favoured an anti-crisis cabinet of technocrats with broad support.
"There is a big risk there will be a deadlocked parliament," added another analyst, Ognyan Minchev. "This is a goodbye for GERB. They will not govern the country," Gallup analyst Kancho Stoychev said, adding that a scandal-ridden campaign and allegations about vote-rigging had put GERB in "total isolation." About 50 percent of the 6.9 million Bulgarians eligible to vote turned up at the stations Sunday, the polls showed. The first official results were not expected until late morning on Monday, with the allocation of parliamentary seats not until several days after that. | ||
| Posted by:Steve White |