Bulgaria will have two rounds of elections in a month after Parliament turned down the proposal to hold elections for European Parliament and Bulgarian Parliament, scheduled for the summer of 2009, in one day.

On March 5 2009, 101 MPs voted against the proposal put forward by the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP); 79 voted in favour and nine MPs abstained. The other 51 MPs in the 240-seat Parliament were absent.

The outcome was expected, since NMSP's partners in the ruling coalition - the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) - have previously rejected the idea of having two elections in one day.

Of the two elections, a date has been set only for the European Parliament vote, which will have to be between June 4 and June 7 2009. BSP, the senior partner in the coalition, is in favour of holding the elections on June 7.

President Georgi Purvanov is yet to declare a date for the Bulgarian Parliament elections. The four year-term of the current National Assembly expires on June 25 2009 and, according to the constitution, elections cannot be held before this date.

One option for having elections in one day was for the Government to file its resignation earlier than June 25 2009, which met the resistance of the BSP who did not want to have a Government's resignation on their record after the party's 1995/96 cabinet was forced to resign.

The other option was a change to the constitution, the one pursued by NMSP. The party won the support of the right-wing opposition and more than 100 000 people, but failed in getting the support of its two coalition partners, who claimed that the idea contradicted the constitution and would have resulted in having two National Assemblies overlapping each other - the old one with a few weeks left of its term and the new one.

The opposition, however, accused the two parties of trying to boost their elections results. Both BSP and MRF have large cores of support and would benefit most from a low voter turnout. Having two elections in one day was seen as a way of boosting turnout, but that now appears unlikely, especially with so many Bulgarians taking their summer holiday in June.

Results from recent years show that low turnout is damaging to the small right-wing parties which unlike the BSP, the MRF and ultra-nationalist Ataka party have problems mobilising their supporters after the 2001 split which resulted in several right-wing parties.

Next to that, MRF has traditionally relied on the support of the several hundred thousand Muslim Bulgarians living in Turkey. In the last elections for European Parliament, MPs decided that Bulgarian who live permanently outside the EU must have lived in Bulgaria permanently for at least 60 days in the three months proceeding the elections in order to vote. The move was criticised by the MRF back them, since the party saw it as an attempt to prevent Bulgarians living in Turkey from voting in European elections since there isn't any such limitations when it comes to elections for Bulgarian Parliament.

Despite the limitation, however, the MRF did well in 2007 and came third with four MEPs. The party of Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov and BSP each won five MEP seats.

This time, MRF argued that should elections be held in one day, Bulgarians living in Turkey would have been confused in voting for one Parliament and not for the other.