Comment by Emilia Milcheva:
Persons, not reforms, have once again hindered the formation of a regular government. GERB-SDF put forward such an official reason - that they are ending the negotiations, since “Democratic Bulgaria” (DB) has rejected the candidacies of both Boyko Borisov and Rosen Zhelyazkov for prime minister of the future cabinet. The announcement came out of the blue, as it was preceded by a series of announcements from party press centers that a coalition agreement with governance priorities was being discussed - that is, there were reasons to expect a regular government.
At 5:40 p.m. on Sunday, GERB published the news of the termination of the negotiations on Facebook, without discussing it with the other participants. The DB announced that they learned from the media after 80 minutes earlier, at 4:20 p.m., the “regular meeting of the negotiations”, in which “There is such a people” (ITN) and BSP-United Left also participated, had ended. Even the agreement on joint governance was at a “very advanced stage”, although incomplete.
However, none of the political forces uttered the word “elections”, and the news was also perceived as an attempt at arm-twisting by the largest party, GERB.
Who is to blame
You can't step into the same river twice, but in politics it is clearly possible to play the same trick more than once, as GERB-SDF demonstrated with the unilateral interruption of consultations. This is what they did in March last year, when the GERB negotiating team - Denitsa Sacheva, Temenuzhka Petkova and Raya Nazaryan, headed by Maria Gabriel, announced that due to the PP-DB's request to also receive the Ministry of Interior, there would be no rotation and the cabinet would fall. But at least there was a press conference then, and now they announced it on Facebook.
It is hard to believe that if the parties in negotiations had found common ground for a coalition agreement, a decision-making mechanism and filling parliamentary quotas in bodies with expired mandates, they would not have agreed on the composition of the government. The differences on the issue of the prime minister were clear from the very beginning. The Bulgarian Democratic Party, the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Bulgarian Nationalist Party have repeatedly stated that they do not accept Boyko Borisov as prime minister, and the Bulgarian Democratic Party's formula is "mutually acceptable", although they have not publicly named names. But this negotiation process is also subject to the principle of "Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed".
With its actions yesterday, GERB pointed to the Bulgarian Democratic Party as the "culprit" for the failure of the negotiations. For its voters, Boyko Borisov's party has an easy-to-communicate position: “Without us, there can be no regular government, we won the elections, therefore we will nominate a prime minister! The DB has excessive claims.” And the hard core responds: “Exactly! We outsmarted them again, we made them understand!”
The community around the DB greeted the suspension (or rather the termination) of the negotiations with mixed feelings and comments like “there is no way to negotiate judicial and anti-corruption reform with GERB”. But there is no one else, that is the material, if one paraphrases a Boyko Borisov statement from the recent past.
Nearly 10 months ago, the real reason for the failure of the negotiations was the lack of guarantees for the MRF in the election of members of bodies and regulators - GERB proposed such, but the PP-DB did not accept them. Their rejection meant that Delyan Peevski remained without a quota, even though he is part of the “constitutional majority” of the 160 necessary for the vote of key elected officials in the judiciary and the anti-corruption commission.
The MRF-New Beginning and the Cordon Sanitaire
Now the oligarch, sanctioned for corruption by the US and the UK, is calling for elections and is opposed to the formation of a regular government, which isolates him along with his MRF-New Beginning. The reason is the ”sanitary cordon” requested by the PP-DB. If a majority is formed to undertake the long-awaited personnel renewal of the regulators and the Supreme Judicial Council, Peevski's circle will lose the “clubs”.
If GERB joins such a front, this will be a sign of a serious confrontation between Borisov and Peevski. The question is whether the leader of the largest party has the power advantages to lead this battle, after the honorary chairman of the MRF and a key figure of the transition like Dogan failed. A political conflict of this scale requires the efforts of more than one party.
Failure of the negotiations would also mean failure of a majority to vote for the changes to the Judiciary Act (JSA), which would stop the election of the current acting Prosecutor General Borislav Sarafov as Prosecutor General of the Supreme Judicial Council with an expired mandate. This will be clear tomorrow, January 7, when the parliamentary legal committee will discuss the draft JSA. Its adoption is one of the conditions set by “Democratic Bulgaria”, for the negotiations for a regular cabinet as one of the measures for the “sanitary cordon”.
Consequences
The direct consequences of the failure of the first mandate will be failure for both the second and the third. Bulgaria is once again heading towards elections, probably in April, accompanied by growing apathy and political radicalization.
The political impasse may lead not just to a delay, but to a regression in the country's socio-economic development. Bulgaria risks losing the second tranche of 653 million euros under the Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP). At the end of November last year, the European Commission gave it a 6-month deadline to complete the remaining unfulfilled reforms. Given the looming elections, they will be wasted.
The chances of adopting the euro from January 1, 2026 are also disappearing. Only a regular government could plan and implement an anti-inflation policy if Bulgaria seeks to meet the only unfulfilled criterion - that of price stability. The caretaker government has declared its readiness to request extraordinary convergence reports by January 15, when the December inflation data will be released. Now the country is threatened by a new waste of funds, fueled by populist promises, if the 51st parliament adopts a budget for 2025. in the context of an upcoming vote.
Bulgarian Easter comes with new early elections - or with a compromise government that would distribute influence among regulators and the judiciary, and then leave.