SOFIA (Reuters) – Bulgaria’s parliament on Wednesday rejected a technocrat government proposed by the centre-right GERB party, deepening a prolonged political impasse in the Balkan country and bringing it closer to another snap election.
GERB, the party of former prime minister Boyko Borissov who led the country for over a decade before losing power in 2021 following public protests over corruption, won an Oct. 2 election but has failed to secure majority backing for any functioning cabinet in a tight parliament.
The Balkan country has gone through four elections in the past 18 months, hurting policymaking while Europe grapples with the impact of war in Ukraine and soaring energy costs and food prices that are hitting households hard.
The parliamentary vote on Wednesday saw GERB’s nominee for prime minister, Nikolay Gabrovski, a 51-year-old non-partisan neurosurgeon, failing to win the necessary support to lead a technocrat government. He won only 113 votes in the 240-seat parliament.
Gabrovski said the failed vote meant that instead of the country dealing with economic and security issues, “we will be heading to the abyss of series of snap polls.”
President Rumen Radev was now expected to ask GERB’s main rival, the anti-graft party We Continue the Change, led by the country’s last prime minister, Kiril Petkov, to form a government.
Its chances for success, however, are also slim as it lacks enough allies in parliament for a majority.
If a third, final attempt to form a government also fails, Radev would have to dissolve parliament and call snap polls within two months.
Failure to form a regular government would weigh on Bulgaria’s plans to join the euro zone in 2024, efforts to join the EU’s visa-free Schengen zone, and hurt its ability to tap efficiently billions of euros in EU funding.
It would also leave the Black Sea country under the rule of a caretaker government, hampering efforts to put a comprehensive 2023 budget in place to tackle surging inflation and economic weakness and carry out reforms to tackle high-level graft.
(Reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova, editing by Jason Hovet, Louise Heavens, Alexandra Hudson)
