No Clear Majority Party Emerges in Bulgaria Vote

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/06/world/no-clear-majority-party-emerges-in-bulgaria-vote.html

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SOFIA, Bulgaria — Bulgaria faced the prospect of another shaky governing coalition on Sunday as exit polls indicated that as many as eight political parties could have a voice in a new Parliament.

The failure of any party to win a clear majority is likely to prolong the country’s political stalemate as it grapples with a sluggish economy and a banking crisis.

The Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, a center-right party known by its Bulgarian acronym GERB, won about a third of the vote on Sunday but fell short of an outright majority, according to exit polls. The Socialist Party, the leaders of the previous cabinet, captured only about 16 percent of the vote. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which represents the country’s Turkish minority, gathered a little more than 15 percent, according to early exit poll results.

Three smaller parties also won seats, while two others hovered around the 4 percent threshold to enter Parliament, which has 240 seats.

By 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, 80 percent of the votes had been counted. About half of eligible Bulgarians voted. Official results are expected on Monday.

Boiko Borisov, GERB’s leader, thanked supporters at a news conference here in the capital, but declined to mention potential coalition partners. “With this configuration, I don’t see how we’re going to form a cabinet,” he said.

The Reformist Bloc, an alliance of five center-right parties that many saw as GERB’s best partner to form a stable coalition, captured just 9 percent of the vote, which dashed most hopes for a two-party partnership. But Radan Kanev, leader of the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, part of the Reformist Bloc, said Sunday that it was still a possibility because the final results had not yet been tallied.

Other alternatives for GERB included a grand coalition with the Socialists or a more complex multiparty alliance with a host of less likely partners.

The election, Bulgaria’s third in just two years, was called after the previous minority government, led by the Socialists, resigned in July. The cabinet was forced to step down after the party lost the support of its coalition partners following a poor performance in European Parliament elections in May.

The administration of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski was in power for only 14 months and was shaken by anticorruption protests, devastating floods and a run on the Corporate Commercial Bank, one of the country’s largest lenders. Bulgaria has been governed by a caretaker government since early August.

Last year’s mass protests erupted just three weeks into the cabinet’s term, when the Socialists appointed the media tycoon Delyan Peevski as director of the national security agency without any hearings or debates. The appointment was later revoked but demonstrators continued to demand the cabinet’s resignation.

Bulgaria, the European Union’s poorest member, has been politically unstable since early 2013, when nationwide protests over high energy bills forced the cabinet, led by GERB, to resign. In the snap election that followed, Mr. Borisov’s party failed to win a majority and was unable to attract a coalition partner, and was forced into the role of opposition.

A Gallup poll conducted last month found that about a third of voters supported GERB but 59 percent thought Mr. Borisov should not be prime minister. The poll, which was based on in-person interviews of 1,010 eligible Bulgarian voters, was conducted Sept. 12-18 and had a sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points.

Bulgaria, which joined the European Union in 2007, is struggling to catch up economically to the rest of Europe. The economy is growing at a rate of 1.6 percent annually but its per capita gross domestic product is only about 50 percent of the bloc’s average.