On July 5th, parliamentary elections were held in Bulgaria. Accordinding to the preliminary results based on 100 per cent of the tally sheets from the constituency electoral commissions there will be 6 parties in the new parliament: – Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB): 39.71 per cent; – Coalition for Bulgaria (CfB): 17.70 per cent; – Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF): 14.46 per cent; – Ataka: 9.36 per cent; – The Blue Coalition: 6.76 per cent and Order, Lawfulness, Justice (OLJ): 4.13 per cent.
The turnout was 60.20 %.
GERB (Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria of the Sofia mayor Boyko Borisov)  will have 116 seats in the Parliamen, 5 short of a majority. The party of the mayor of Sofia remained aside from pre-election intrigues, tried to focus on its ideas for the future of the country and rarely let falling scandals. GERB’s campaign was largely based on Borisov’s promises to deal with corruption and send to prison all those involved in the EU funds embezzlement. Mr Borisov said he would form a coalition government.
 
Instead the party of the prime minister Sergey Stanishev, BSP (the Bulgarian Socialist Party) is more than twice below the winner with 17.72%. The result is surprising given the fact that neither the prime minister nor his ministers took a vacation for their campaigns and, in fact, used the instruments of power in their campaign.
 
The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) who came 3rd was banking on tens of thousands of Bulgarian-born Turks returning from Turkey to their home villages as “election tourists,” or staying in Turkey to vote in some 123 polling stations set up there.
Several notorious gang members who were running in the elections, seeking immunity from prosecution that comes with a seat in the parliament — a virtual “Get Out of Jail Free” card did not make it.

And one more very interesting thing – the sociologists have not guessed. Most of the polls gave much smaller result of GERB – somewhere around 30% and the second party – BSP was supposed to follow GERB not with much. But the political analyst Ognyan Minchev said something very strange: he said that sociologists did not dare say what the real results of GERB are. This statement raises a lot of questions and in the next months it would be very interesting to analyse the situation.
Obviously the time has come not only for a change of politicians and their actions but also for a change of the behaviour of the sociologists, political experts and other ologists. May be it won’t be too bad serious regulation to be considered so that there are no doubts on whether sociological agencies give biased results.

Velko Ivanov
Secretary General
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EUROPEAN MOVEMENT – BULGARIA
10 Narodno Sabranie Sq.,room 302
1000 Sofia
BULGARIA
tel/ fax: ++359 2 987 22 85
tel: ++359 2 986 79 82
E-mail: asea@scas.acad.bg