Former Bulgarian prime minister Boyko Borissov’s GERB party won early elections for the third time since 2013, giving it the upper hand over the more pro-Russian Socialists in forming a government, early official results showed.
GERB won 33 percent of the votes, while the Bulgarian Socialist Party — successor to the Communist Party — was second with 27 percent, the Central Electoral Commission in Sofia yesterday said on its Web site, with 94 percent of the ballots counted.
GERB must now find coalition partners, with the third-placed United Patriots open to an alliance.
While backing the EU, GERB and the Socialists both campaigned to revive economic ties with Russia to benefit voters in the bloc’s poorest nation who feel let down a decade after joining, but the Socialists vowed to go furthest, by vetoing EU sanctions against Russia.
The election in the NATO member of 7.2 million people was triggered when Borissov resigned after his candidate lost the presidential ballot to a Russia-friendly Socialist in November last year.
“Bulgarians bet on keeping the country’s pro-European direction and didn’t fully share the Socialists’ policies for change,” Alpha Research executive director Genoveva Petrova said by telephone. “GERB will have to rely on support from nationalist and populist parties, which will undermine the stability of the coalition.”
Borissov, a 57-year-old former bodyguard, will probably team up with the United Patriots, who got 9.1 percent of votes, plus tycoon Vesselin Mareshki’s Will with 4.2 percent, according to Lubomir Mitov, chief central and eastern European economist at UniCredit SpA in London.
Five parties cleared parliament’s 4 percent entry barrier, including one that represents Bulgaria’s ethnic Turks, who comprise 8 percent of the population.
The Movement has 9 percent of the votes.
“The result is categorical — it reconfirms that GERB must be the leading party in the future government,” Borissov said in televised comments. “We must have a stable government and a stable opposition.”
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