If exit polls are correct, Bulgaria’s foreign minister, one of his predecessors and its European Commissioner – herself a former minister – have been elected MEPs. The question is whether any of them will.
 
Ivailo Kalfin, who took leave from his post as Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in the Bulgarian Socialist Party-led tripartite governing coalition, is list leader for the BSP-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria, said by exit polls on June 7 2009 to have won four seats.
 
Kalfin is a social democrat, rather than a member of the BSP, and his place on the Coalition for Bulgaria list was regarded as noteworthy – and several commentators suggested that he was there on the basis of his personal popularity to draw votes to the ticket.
 
The case is the same with Meglena Kouneva, who was European integration minister in the current and previous governments before becoming European Consumer Protection Commissioner after Bulgaria joined the EU in January 2007.
 
Kouneva similarly has individual popularity. Exit polls said that the party for which she was number one on the ticket, Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress, could win one seat. Previously, opinion polls gave the party scant chance of a place in the European Parliament, and her nomination was also widely seen as a vote-puller.
 
Nadezhda Mihailova was foreign minister in Ivan Kostov’s government, which was voted out of office in scheduled parliamentary elections in June 2001. Mihailova went on to succeed Kostov as leader of the right-wing Union of Democratic Forces, which Kostov quit to form his own party, the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria. Mihailova, since succeeded as UDF leader by three other people, and who in 2003 failed as the UDF candidate for mayor of Sofia, is the ticket leader for the Blue Coalition, formed by Kostov and the UDF’s Martin Dimitrov.
 
Not taking up a seat to which one has been elected has a notable precedent in recent Bulgarian political history – in the shape of Boiko Borissov.
 
In the 2005 elections, Borissov, then interior ministry chief secretary, stood as a candidate for Saxe-Coburg’s party, in a move widely seen as a vote-getter for the party. However, on election, he refused to be sworn in as a member of the National Assembly, returned to his old job, from which he then quit to go on to stand as a candidate for mayor of Sofia and to form GERB, the party that now has taken most votes in Bulgaria’s European Parliament elections and appears poised for victory in the July 5 national parliamentary elections.