Bulgarian President to offer populist ITN party mandate to seek to form government

Sofia: Bulgarian President Roumen Radev will on July 29 offer the third and final in a series of mandates to seek to get a government elected to Parliament’s smallest group, populist ITN.

Failure at this third stage of the process will send Bulgaria to early parliamentary elections, which would be the seventh time in just more than three years that Bulgarians elect a legislature.

This stage has been reached after the 50th National Assembly did not support the proposal made by the largest parliamentary group, Boiko Borissov’s GERB-UDF, and the second-largest group, We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria, gave up its attempt.

The constitution accords the head of state a free choice in deciding to which parliamentary group to offer the third mandate.

Radev chose ITN, which has 16 MPs in Bulgaria’s 240-seat legislature.

ITN, which repeatedly has asked to receive the third mandate, has said that if getting it, it would invite all other groups for talks, as well as those MPs no longer members of a parliamentary group. It has spoken of wanting an “expert” government.

Borissov has rejected the notion of a government elected on the basis of a mandate held by one of the smallest parliamentary groups, while most other groups have portrayed failure, and early parliamentary elections, as practically inevitable.

In one of a succession of previous parliaments, ITN was the largest parliamentary group and thus was entitled to be the first to receive a mandate to try to form a government. It botched that attempt.