AFTER almost a month of political bargaining and coalition talks, and the dramatic events on July 26 and 27 in Parliament, by the time The Sofia Echo went to press on the morning of July 28, the new Cabinet of Bulgaria was still uncertain.
The somewhat unexpected twist happened in the early hours of July 28 during an unprecedented 17-hour session of Parliament, in which the MPs elected the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Sergei Stanishev as Prime Minister, but several hours later did not approve the structure and personal line-up of his proposed cabinet.
After Stanishev was elected as Prime Minister by a slim vote of 120 for and 119 against, the MPs could not agree as to whether he should vote after he had been sworn in, with the possible loss of his MP prerogatives.
This case protracted the voting procedure until around 2am, when it emerged that the outcome of the voting on the Cabinet structure was tied - 119 votes for and 119 against, while the personal line-up was overruled by a vote of 117 for and 118 against.
Suspicions among opposition MPs ensued immediately over the BSP and their coalition partners' 116 votes, plus the one vote of Petar Manolov, the MP who left Ataka.
On their part, the opposition had 123 votes, minus the vote of Anastasia Mozer who is abroad due to her husband's illness. Before leaving, however, Mozer said she was going to vote against.
As it turned out, however, three opposition MPs supported Stanishev's candidacy and suspicions fell on three MPs from Ataka who refused to show their ballots to the electoral commission.
Ataka leader Volen Siderov said that he would expel them. Later rumours were spread that they had been locked up in Ataka deputy leader Petar Beron's room in order to stop them from taking part in the vote on Cabinet.
In the Parliament lobbies it was reported that MPs were saying that the price offered by the BSP for a vote was 300 000 euro.   
When the official results were announced, members of the opposition demanded a recess. After the recess, only MPs from the BSP and their coalition partners from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) came back to the hall. BSP MP Mihail Mikov demanded a second vote, claiming that what had happened was unacceptable and that there had been tremendous political pressure on the MPs from their political leadership.
The request was granted by the presiding Speaker of Parliament Georgi Pirinski, in spite of the fact that there was no quorum in the hall. The second vote was scheduled for
10 am on July 28. 
In the Parliament lobbies, heated debate erupted and Pirinski was accused by opposition MPs of trampling on the constitution.
MPs from all opposition parties demanded that the BSP return the mandate and urged President Georgi Purvanov to give the mandate to the second largest group in Parliament, the National Movement Simeon II (NMSII).  
In a statement in Parliament at around 3 am, the floor leader of the NSMII Anelia Mingova, as well as the floor leaders of the opposition parties, accused the BSP and the MRF of trying to usurp power.
She accused Pirinski of violating the constitution and said that from that point onwards, it was up to President Purvanov to decide what would happen. 
In an interview the following morning, the former judge from the Constitutional Court Georgi Markov, who has never hidden his right-wing affiliations, said that there should not be a re-voting of the secret vote.
"There should not be a re-vote of a secret vote because the members of Parliament have spoken - the mandate has failed," said Markov in an interview with the bTV morning talkshow.
According to him, Stanishev was misled as he rushed to swear in as Prime Minister. "If he really wanted to run the country, he should have known when he should be sworn in," Markov said.
Markov also said that currently the Prime Minister is Simeon Saxe-Coburg with his Cabinet because the Cabinet of Stanishev has not been elected yet.
"The President should exercise his commission and constitutional obligations after the Parliament rejected the proposed draft Cabinet and hand the mandate to the second largest political power - the NMSII," said Alexander Pramatarski, member of the United Democratic Forces (UtDF) also in an interview with bTV.
Pramatarski defined the violations by Pirinski as unprecedented and announced that representatives of the UtDF, the Bulgarian People's Union, Democrats for Strong Bulgaria and the NMSII have decided that leaders of these parties will demand that President Purvanov should exercise his constitutional obligations.
The deputy BSP leader Rumen Petkov said that the past two days were a demonstration of the attempts to vandalise the Parliament.
According to him, the BSP had demonstrated its willingness to form a stable Cabinet but if this couldn't happen, the only solution would be early elections.