Goritsa Grancharova, who was designated as acting prime minister, presented the composition of the new acting cabinet to the head of state. She is betting on Kalin Stoyanov as interior minister, and President Rumen Radev has declared against his candidacy and set a deadline of 15 hours for a new nomination or he will not sign the decree. In response, the candidate for prime minister defended the nomination of Kalin Stoyanov for interior minister. Thus, the elections are postponed until after October 20, and Dimitar Glavchev remains acting prime minister. What else follows in this situation… Lawyer Petar Slavov spoke to FAKTI.
- Lawyer Slavov, we found ourselves in an interesting case after President Rumen Radev refused to sign a decree for Gorica Grancharova-Kozhareva's office because her list of names included Kalin Stoyanov as interior minister. What's next from here?
- There are several scenarios. What is certain at the moment is that the originally announced date of October 20 for elections will be postponed. The reason is that we have not appointed a new cabinet, which is the procedure to schedule elections. Now we will continue with the so-called “home book“ accordingly, to search for a new candidate for Prime Minister, who will propose to the President a new composition of the Council of Ministers, which will be accepted by the head of state and he will issue the appointment decree. When we have a new cabinet, then a date can now be fixed for directing an election. At the moment, the elections are temporarily postponed, it is not known how long. The absurdity of the whole situation is also something I have been talking about since the very beginning when these changes to the Constitution were proposed. Perhaps now they have reached their highest point of absurdity, because what I pointed out then, when the changes were introduced in the 49th National Assembly, was that there was a lack of clearly spelled out responsibility for the appointment of the caretaker government. You see now how complete the absurdity is. You have some kind of list - the so-called “house book”, but at the same time, a large part of the posts in it are vacant.
- And the choice is narrowed…
- That's right. There is another. It turns out that the people proposed by the candidate for acting prime minister of the president may also be a problem. The head of state is not obliged to accept them. Therefore, he himself has some part of the responsibility for the cabinet and is left with the opportunity to judge - whether to accept them or not. At the moment, the president says that he does not accept Kalin Stoyanov and expects him to be replaced at some point, to be offered another name. But Gorica Grancharova-Kozhareva told him that she had no intention of proposing another, and the procedure ended ingloriously. Thus, the already appointed cabinet of Dimitar Glavchev, who swore before the National Assembly, so that the mish-mash of who is responsible, remains.
- And here again comes the role of the Constitutional Court, which failed to form a majority and declare these changes in the Constitution, related to the official cabinet, as unconstitutional?
- In the Constitutional Court, if you remember, there the vote remained 6:6 because of the political appointments, which were again the work of the 49th National Assembly, as a result of the powers of the official cabinet. That is, the Supreme Court did not rule on their unconstitutionality. Thus, the amendments continue to apply.
- And this will be the case until a new person is proposed to propose a new cabinet that the president can again confirm with all the names if he likes them…
- That's right. Including Glavchev can be offered to him. Here things are already based on conversations that - as we all guessed - the president is having with the potential candidates for prime ministers, in which certain conditions may be set, but they are not held publicly. We now see with Grancharova-Kozhareva that they talked about something before the mandate was handed over, but now she practically stuck to the interior minister and this led to the failure of the procedure. It would have been very interesting here, as one of your colleagues said, if she had proposed Stoyan Kalinov, and not Kalin Stoyanov, for interior minister. That is, someone with the same profile, with the same contacts and affiliations, but with a different name, another person. Would things not have passed then… Maybe she didn't think of it, and maybe she was looking for an excuse to get rid of all the work and not pass the project for the cabinet, including Kalin Stoyanov... Here we can only guess, but it is also a fact that we are at the beginning of a constitutional crisis. After this development, we do not have a clear date for elections, we do not know when a new procedure will be launched, when it will start, when it will end - a pending situation. And this is because the amendments to the Constitution did not set any deadlines regarding this procedure. In reality, it can develop in some time and some terms, no matter how absurd this sounds. And so the postponement of the elections will turn into a rather long period.