Bulgaria elections - 5 October 2014

[GMantis]

There I was thinking that I had to write something about this election and someone has gone and explained everything as well as I would have done (or perhaps better ) A few comments and answers to the questions raised here:

Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB): Populist, cartoonishly corrupt party currently acting the part of the centre-right opposition.

What's the centre part doing here? The finance minister in the last government was a former World Bank employee and he certainly did his best to do in practice what he had worked in theory in his former job.

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More like yet another pseudo-populist party designed to get its leader (former popular journalist Nikolay Barekov) into government. In fact, judging from the results of the last European election, it probably took more votes from BSP than GERB


Alternative for Bulgarian Revival: Party led by former President Georgi Parvanov, who broke away from the Socialist Party, slightly to the left of the Socialist Party.

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The key point is whether they'll be able to form a coalition only with the Reformist Block or whether they'll need another partner (most likely Barekov's party, though MRF is also possible)

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Probably even more since the other parties are occasionally punished by their voters for being too corrupt, while MRF's voting share is not dependent on it actions and so there is little incentive for it to be at least somewhat discrete about its corruption.

Some guy who was expelled from the Bulgarian Socialist Party was selected to be interim PM until the elections.

Perhaps Mantis can tell us the story of why he was expelled.

For his passionate support for the protests against the government. For example, he went as far as using his position as university lecturer to call on his students to occupy the university. Of course he's been in conflict with the party for a long time, though the last straw was Ivaylo Kalfin being selected to be BSP presidential candidate instead of him. He was especially angered by the fact that while he had been always loyal to BSP, Kalfin had abandoned the BSP at one point (and he did it again recently when he joined Parvanov's ABV). Of course this might have been just posturing to get his current position (the fact that he was supposedly angry with BSP about their flat tax and now has joined an even more right-wing party)

GERB hinted at a grand coalition and then quickly backtracked.

Still, I think they really mean it.

It's pretty much the only solution besides a perpetual caretaker government.

Grand coalitions have a very low reputation here after the grotesque triple coalition of BSP, NMSS and MRF which Borisov defeated in a near landslide in 2009 (the non-MRF part of the coalition lost more than 60% of its voting strength; the MRF gained votes).

Another party which may get into parliament is the Patriotic Front.

The Patriotic Front is a coalition of two right-wing groups. One is the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria, a far-right group which split from Attack and runs a TV station called SKAT. It was also the largest party not to get into parliament in the last elections. The other component is the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization, a somewhat more traditional conservative which takes its name from a 19th anti-Ottoman movement. They ran in an alliance with Bulgaria Without Censorship earlier this year in the EU elections but decided to switch for some reason.

The Patriotic Front is actually a much saner party that Siderov's attack and some of the people working for SKAT have only the fault of being too outspoken. As for VMRO, Barekov's two main sponsors fell out, the richer one's bank almost went bankrupt and he was eventually forced to flee the country, so Barekov no longer has the financial resources which attracted the VMRO in the first place.

I'm mostly just guessing but probably their de facto support of the Socialist-Turkish government.

Also, the loss of the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria and their TV station couldn't have helped either, although that actually happened before the last election.

Yes, mainly that. The loss of the TV station nearly knocked them out last parliament, but then the combination of several ethnic crises in 2011 which they used to rally their voters and a sudden reversal from open support of GERB (which is what led to the split with the National Front in the first place) to becoming their harshest critics led to them clawing back enough support to enter parliament again. But this time around (hopefully) they'll be gone for good.

[GMantis]

No results yet but wikipedia now lists all the polls if anyone is interested:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_parliamentary_election,_2014

They even list them down to the Attack party and the Alternative for Bulgarian Development.

There have been other polls which showed them close or even over 4%, especially the later.

Now, in the tradition of election day only "rankings", the following popularity chart of Russian and Ukrainian music has been released:

My General by Marina Hlebnikova - 34.5%
Red Riding Hood by Nastya Kamenskih - 17%
Eastern Tales - 11.5%
We go to fight the Bolshevics by Bloc Post - 9.7%
Everyone left for the front by Vladimir Visotsky - 6.9%
In nature without censorship by Potap and Nastya Kamenskih - 5.5%
Lili Marleen - Russian version of a popular WWII German song - 4.9%
Alphabet by Olga Loginova - 4.6%

[GMantis]

First exit poll results:

Gallup
GERB 33.2
BSP 16.5
MRF 14.1
Reformist Bloc 8.7
Patriotic Front 6.3
Bulgaria without censorship 6
Alternative for Bulgarian Development 4.1
Attack 3.9

Alpha Research
GERB 33.9
BSP 16.1
MRF 14
Reformist Bloc 8.6
Patriotic Front 6.3
Bulgaria without censorship 5.6
Alternative for Bulgarian Development 4.9
Attack 4.4

It's too close to call whether ABV and Attack will enter parliament.

[GMantis]

8 parties in parliament would be a record.

The situation is further complicated by the fact that two of these parties are actually coalitions with only loose association between the parties within them and liable to collapse under pressure.

[GMantis]

Do you know within the Reformist Bloc, which parties favor a coalition with GERB and which are opposed?

None of them have opposed a possible coalition -  of course, with certain conditions. The problem will be finding a third coalition partner, since GERB and the block together can't form a government. It seems quite possible that the UDF and DSB won't like a coalition with the MRF, while the Patriotic Front will certainly not want a coalition with an alliance containing a nationalist Turkish party, especially one more extreme than the MRF (the Freedom and Dignity Party). And of course Borisov stated that he won't form a coalition with the MRF or with Bulgaria without censorship, the only other possibility.

Bulgarian Socialist Party is embarrassingly close to being overtaken by the Turkish party.

This is what happens when you abandon most of your core positions (most notably, support for social welfare and having better relations with Russia), ally for nearly a decade with the most hated party in Bulgaria (at least for the ethnic Bulgarian majority) and on top of that, the popular former president abandons the party because he didn't get to be leader.

[GMantis]

Apparently all the votes have been counted. I don't know why it's taking so long to work out the seats.

They have been worked out, it's just that the Electoral Commission hasn't got around to publishing them yet.

Looks like the coalition will be GERB + Reformist Bloc + Alternative for Bulgarian Revival (+ Patriotic Front if that isn't enough).

A coalition with the left-wing ABV doesn't seem very likely. I would say the Patriotic Front or Bulgaria without Censorship are more likely partners.
And of course there is no need for formal coalitions. It's quite possible for GERB to attempt to form a minority government, relying on the votes of other parties (or parts of coalitions - the Reformist Bloc is not exactly stable) without actually promising them anything. As to why the other parties would agree to this, there are plenty of incentives: they'll have financial difficulties participating in another election, they may achieve worse results the next election (seems especially likely for Bulgaria without Censorship, which declined from their European election results) and they might receive backlash for failing to form another government - GERB is already preparing a media campaign to transfer blame to the others if there are new elections.

[GMantis]

English Wikipedia is giving these numbers, don't know where they came from:

GERB 84
BSP 39
MRF 38
Reformist Bloc 23
Patriotic Front 19
Bulgaria Without Censorship 15
Attack 11
Alternative for Bulgarian Revival 11

GERB+Reformist Bloc+ABR = 118 if those numbers are true, 3 short of a majority.

They would need to bring on the Patriotic Front or Bulgaria Without Censorship.

These are the correct numbers. You can see here (only in Bulgarian) the distribution of seats by electoral districts.
As for the scenario where the coalition is a few seats short of a majority (including the above scenario, but also the more likely case where they ally with a bigger party, but get support from only part of Reformist Bloc) a few MRF deputies may decide "spontaneously" to support the Borisov government.

[GMantis]

All it takes is a single defection and MRF becomes the official opposition. That's rough.

Mantis, did you vote for the BSP again?

No, I couldn't vote for them again after the way they screwed up during Oresharski's government. I believe that political parties should be punished for their failures and not rewarded by voting for them again. Plus, I'm not at all convinced that the new BSP leadership is actually committed towards leading the BSP out of the quagmire where Stanishev lead it.
Since voting for a party that hasn't a chance to enter parliament is the same as not voting, I had to vote for the least evil - which by the process of elimination turned out to be the Patriotic Front.

[GMantis]

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Why would they be older?

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Also a large proportion of the MRF electorate is not very fluent in Bulgarian (or not at all, like many of the immigrants to Turkey). As for the Reformist Bloc, they're composed of five parties which have little friendship between each other and since candidates from different parties run on the same list, their voters were probably trying to move up candidates from their own party, leading to higher preference voting.

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The MRF leadership has been trying to win them over for years, with fluctuating results. My guess is that they tend to vote for the party in power. Of course, there's also all the vote buying, for which there are indications that the MRF has been the most active this election, though I'm not sure whether that would show up in the exit poll results.

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My best guess is vote buying.

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One should be cautious about putting too much stock in these numbers, which are likely based on small samples and are probably not statistically significant.

[GMantis]

Results of the election by electoral district:

[GMantis]

What percentage of Roma are Muslim? Does that percentage more or less line up with the percentage that vote for the MRF?

There are different estimates varying between a third and a half. And yes, Muslim Gypsies are far more likely to vote for the MRF, especially those who identify as Turks or speak Turkish - mostly those living in Thrace or in the northeast. But most Gypsies living in western Bulgaria are Christians and the MRF has substantial support among them. In fact,  they provide the vast majority of votes for MRF in Western Bulgaria (except in Blagoevgrad province).

[GMantis]

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Why would they be older?

Older people tend to be more conservative/traditionalist, and Ataka ideology includes elements of traditionalism (I mean, for example, Orthodox Christianity). And as a Russophile, anti-European, anti-NATO party with left-wing economic policies they, as I thought, should get more votes from those who were grown up in socialist Bulgaria (it seems that for roughly the same reasons - relatively left-wing and pro-Russian stance - older Bulgarians tend to vote for BSP).

I would have guessed Attack voters were older too. Although I know they have ties with the National Bolsheviks, so maybe they have a street punk contingent.

These kind of voters tended indeed to vote for BSP, though I wouldn't be surprised if many switched to Attack this time around. But Mortimer is right about their street component - much of their support has always been young or at most middle aged nationalists and I suppose enough of them managed to somehow managed to accept that a nationalist party could indirectly support a government partly controlled by the MRF.

[GMantis]

Results of the election by municipality:

[GMantis]

Is that "GERB/BSP" tie in your city-map a tie in votes or a rough tie in percentages ?

Because the fact that GERB an BSP are tied in so many cities would be kinda fishy, considering Austria for example has 2400 cities and there are hardly any ties, not even to mention ties between the same parties.

It's an exact tie. But what do you mean under many ties? There is only one tie, in Pordim in the central north, marked in a light purple color.
By the way, you can't really compare Bulgarian municipalities with Austrian ones - they tend to be much bigger and include multiple settlements (though usually only one town), so one can't really call them cities either. There are only 264 of them, while there are about five thousand settlements.

[GMantis]

That one area Bulgaria Without Censorship won, is that where Lider is based?

Not exactly.The municipality in question is entirely dependent on coal - it contains the largest coal mine in Bulgaria and a large coal fired power plant. And both are controlled either directly or indirectly (along with many other mines and power plants in Bulgaria) by the oligarch Hristo Kovachki , who founded Lider and allied himself with Bulgaria Without Censorship for this election. He is probably the best know example of the so-called "company vote" where oligarchs "influence" their employees into helping them gain political power.

[GMantis]

Do we know the internal breakdown of seats within electoral alliances yet?

Yes. The reformist bloc has 7 deputies from DSB, 6 from DBG, 4 from UDF and one each from the Bulgarian Agrarian People's Union and the Freedom and Dignity Party, as well as four who are not members of any of the coalition parties, including three from the so-called "Citizen quota".

[GMantis]

Nice to see another poster from Bulgaria! And I hope that you will come out of lurking a bit more often!

And you'd be absolutely correct. No idea where Mantis got the numbers from, but here's the breakdown for the RB - though things are obviously volatile and may change with the constitution of the parliamentary group:
DBG - 7 (from districts 4, 13, 15, 16, 25, 26, 27)
DSB - 5 (districts 3, 14, 23, 24, 25)
UDF - 4 (1, 2, 19, 23)
Freedom and Dignity - 1 (23)
BAPU - 1 (17)
Bulgarian New Democracy - 1 (12)  [a moribund Simeon party splinter, however the deputy is personally popular in Montana]

The 4 unaffiliated are from districts 23, 24 (2) and 29.

Broadly speaking, the pro-Borisov camp is composed of the DBG, UDF, BAPU and BND deputies, while DSB, FD + 3 of the 4 unaffiliated are against a coalition (to varying degrees). The 4th unaffiliated has a very tenuous connection to the RB and is expected to jump ship (probably to GERB) at some point.

From here and I see that this was wrong about the leaders of the 4th and 29th district, though the former is certainly not a member of DBG (they protested against him leading the list) and the later is the son of the leader of DSB in Haskovo, so he's at least close to them.

There are 36 parties represented in the coalitions that have entered parliament - and both GERB and the MRF have given a seat to parties that have supported them without a formal coalition agreement. The only party that has entered parliament on its own (due to the low turnout, it has to be said) is Attack, but they can also be neatly divided into the party leader's lovers and the party leader's drinking buddies. If history is any guide, there will no significant movement away from the 3 major groups, while the smaller parties will have their MPs poached. It is virtually certain that any new government will have to rely on more than 130 votes initially in order to be stable in case of defections, but it's highly likely that whatever coalition comes out, the parliament will be short lived.

I'm not quite sure about this, what with Bulgaria without Censorship being more of a handy source of extra support for GERB than a parliamentary group. And the coalition around the Patriotic Front may not survive any attempt to leave the coalition, as past experience shows...

* Since 2001 the MRF has steadily gained control over all the state agencies of most interest to the rural communities (and mismanaged them horribly, of course, but that's not the issue). Due to the CAP, if you're a land-holder above the subsistence level, you can make a decent living, provided you get access to EU funds dispersed through a MRF fiefdom intermediary. And if you're not, you'll find out that to get irrigation water, to do some illegal logging or to go hunting etc., it helps to befriend the MRF people in your village.

Surely GERB put their own people there? Of course I expect that the MRF did its best to regain its positions there over the last year.

* The MRF may come across as omnipotent, but they have lost more than a third of their votes from the high point of Dogan's power and influence in 2009.

This is one way of looking at things. Another of course is that MRF gained 20% from last year. Partly due to the decline of the Freedom and Dignity party, but probably mostly due to their renewed power in the state apparatus.

* And let's not forget the vote buying.

This, along with their appeal as a defender of minorities to the Gypsy population seems to be the main reason for the current MRF success in rural areas outside their traditional areas. I don't think that most ethnic Bulgarians there would start supporting MRF due to their stranglehold on the agencies concerned with agriculture, in fact I expect that this made them even more unpopular. And of course a strategy aimed at maximising the vote of the Gypsies is going to lose, rather than win non-minority voters. And the geography of the increased vote of the MRF seems to show exactly such a gain with Gypsies.

What do you think would happen if there was a new election?

GERB would almost certainly still win a plurality.

The MRF would probably beat the BSP for second place.

Coalition building would still be unworkable but I'm guessing people would just be tired and let GERB have a minority government.

BSP will probably gain, both from backlash against GERB for failing to form a government and due more time for them to distance themselves from the legacy of Stanishev. And ABV will probably decline, especially after seemingly supporting GERB. But probably not too much change overall.

[GMantis]

Including ABV was quite a clever move. This reduces the threat of the Patriotic Front ending the government at any time they want and gets the coalition 11 guaranteed additional deputies, since ABV certainly won't want new elections after they eliminated any chance of entering Parliament again. What's less clear is why ABV agreed to this...

The government is supposed to last the full 4 year term (lol, no).

Well the coalition has 118 deputies now (see above for why). Add the six who have already switched from Barekov's party and most of the rest who'll inevitably gravitate to the government and I don't see any reason why the government shouldn't last four years.

[GMantis]

ABV aren't a member of the coalition but they have a minister? That's just stupid. Who's the minister?

Ivaylo Kalfin, the BSP candidate for President in 2011, who will be Vice-Prime Minister and minister for demographical and social policy. He seems to be a example of not learning from one's mistakes: he once left the BSP to join another independent leftist party (the Euroleft) which was destroyed due to collaborating with a right-wing party and now he's done it again...