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The parliamentary bloc of Bulgaria Socialist Party (BSP) has decided to leave parliament in protest to new election laws that tighten up the use of preferential voting and mandate increased machine voting in the former communist nation, declaring that free elections can no longer be guaranteed.
As the Socialists control 79 of the 240 seats in parliament, the move, approved by BSP’s national council on Saturday, could lead to numbers in parliament more frequently falling short of those it needs to pass legislation.
BSP, heir to Bulgaria’s once-mighty Communist Party, said the legislation had been made “in the interests of companies and oligarchs, and behind-the-scenes party arrangements only in the interests of certain parties”, reported Reuters.
It seems to be a normal reaction with socialists movements around the world to just quit government if they cannot maintain power, or even try to ‘resist’ the results of elections as we have seen in the United States, where ‘progressives’ have fought the will of the American people in electing Donald Trump to the presidency.
The new Bulgarian election code restricts the use of ‘preferential voting’ where the candidate is not elected on gaining the highest number of ballot wins but on a ‘formula’ which incorporates the ranking of candidates on the ballot.
“For me, this is an attempt of a creeping coup against the democratic processes in general,” GERB [ruling party] lawmaker Spas Garnevski was quoted by the national radio BNR as saying, reported Reuters.
