Politics of Bulgaria

Bulgaria will hold another parliamentary election - its fifth in two years - after the Socialist Party on Tuesday announced that it had failed to form a government and had returned the unfulfilled mandate to the country's president.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev arrives for two-day EU Council meeting in Brussels 20 October 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/STEPHANIE LECOCQ

Snap elections will take place in late March or early April. 

"There is no Radev model, there is a Constitution. It is written there, when the parties cannot form a government, the president forms one. Yes, the next caretaker prime minister will be the old caretaker prime minister. The caretaker government is a counterpoint to feudalization and stagnation. People will look for the team management model.

"The conversation was extremely informative, the foundation was laid with this draft solution. It poses the questions of what we should focus on as national goals that can unite us and as tasks that we must complete together, seeking a majority in the National Assembly. This is the most difficult part of the task, because at the moment we have 109 MPs.

President Rumen Radev handed the second mandate to form a government to the second largest parliamentary group in the 48th National Assembly - that of "We Continue the Change".

"We are nominating Acad. Nikolay Denkov as a candidate for Prime Minister," said the chairman of the parliamentary group of "We Continue the Change" (WCC), Andrey Gyurov.

The Ministry of Transport and Communications will manage "Bulgarian Posts", Deputy Minister Nikolay Naydenov said in the Council of Ministers.

Workers at the construction site of the interconnected IGB gas transmission pipeline, starting at Komotini, Greece and ending at Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, March 2022. Photo: EPA-EFE/DIMITRIS TOSIDIS.

Issues have arisen over the certification of the project, which prompted interim Energy Minister Rosen Hristov, who is yet to publicly comment on the matter, to block the process. 

GERB-SDS did not take the exploratory mandate to form a government within the framework of the 47th National Assembly. The party's refusal was announced by the chairwoman of the parliamentary group Desislava Atanasova.

Rumen Radev will hand over the second mandate to GERB-SDS within days. If the choice of the parties is again early elections, the head of state considers it important to hold them at the beginning of October so that a new parliament has legitimacy.

At 5:00 p.m., President Rumen Radev will receive the candidate for Prime Minister, nominated by the largest parliamentary group in the 47th National Assembly, Asen Vassilev, to whom, according to the constitutional procedure, he handed over the first exploratory mandate to form a government within the current parliament.