Energy tycoon Hristo Kovachki passed his first big election test with a result that might well have been more than satisfying for him, 5.70 per cent. Lider, the party which he openly supports, almost won a seat in the European Parliament at the June 7 elections, which prompted speculation about how, and most of all at what cost, this had happened.
According to Kovachki, this was a result of Lider’s hard work and the fact that the party was well represented at national level. Lider was founded in 2007 as a party of employers and business people, and since then has been building structures all around the country.

For others, however, Lider’s 5.70 per cent was the result of a new trend in Bulgarian politics called "corporate or controlled voting". In other words, the votes of thousands of workers, who also provide for their families, were being used as an election tool. As one of the big employers in the country, it was quite natural that Kovachki became a subject of accusations by Lider’s political opponents.

Trends
Until now, vote buying was regarded only as a way for parties to control the Roma minority in Bulgaria. During the 2007 local elections, however, a number of TV reports showed that this was no longer limited only to the Roma population, but also to other groups, and during the MEP elections the practice emerged as a well organised and planned exercise with a focus on people’s economic dependency.

Speculation about Kovachki’s influence over his workers started weeks before the elections, which forced him to say that "among Lider’s 50 000 members there isn’t a single worker of mine," although Lider chairperson Kancho Filipov is on the board of the Kovachki-controlled Brikel coal company.

Despite Kovachki’s assurances that Lider had won people’s support solely through hard work, minutes after election results were announced on June 8,  parties across the entire political spectrum started accusing him of controlling the votes of his workers.

First was the chairperson of the party that won the largest share of votes, the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (abbreviated as GERB in Bulgarian), Tsvetan Tsvetanov, who told reporters that Lider was one of the parties that had forced people into voting for them.

Others on his list were the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and the conservative small-scale populist party Order, Law, Justice (OLJ).

His opinion about Lider was shared by Iliyana Yotova, of the runner-up in the elections, the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). The right-wing Blue Coalition also said that Lider had been guilty of foul play at the elections, together with the MRF.  

In an interview with Bulgarian-language vsekiden.com, political scientist Antonii Galabov, who is also spokesperson for Transparency Without Borders Association (TBA), said that Lider was among parties that had applied pressure on people to vote. Galabov’s list also included Lider’s coalition partner Novoto Vreme , LOJ and the MRF. According to him, 16.4 per cent of the 37.49 per cent voter turnout was subject to some sort of political control which was "not just vote buying but creating dependency".  

Galabov’s words were based on TBA’s monitoring of more than 500 polling stations around the country. "Such dependency can happen in areas where there is only one big employer and many people have bank payments to cover," he said. Another new trend was "offering farmers a full buyout of their crops  in exchange of their vote," Galabov said.

Next step
At its post-election news conference, Lider showed that these issues were not a matter of concern for them and the party was looking forward with confidence to next month’s elections for Bulgaria’s Parliament. Indeed, with the 5.70 per cent (or 146 984 votes) it won at the MEP elections, Lider has turned into an attractive partner for any of the well-established parties. In a June 9 interview with Bulgarian-language Standart daily, Kovachki set a target of 20 MPs, and said that Lider was ready to work with every party except ultra-nationalist Ataka. The first political force Lider was going to talk to was Napred coalition (formed by three small-scale right-wing parties), he said.

Kovachki’s arithmetic for 20 MPs could be correct. A founding member of Napred, Lider left the coalition weeks before the MEPs elections after failing to reach an agreement about which party registration the coalition would use.

Napred won 2.26 per cent at the MEPs elections which, if added to Lider’s result, makes almost eight per cent. In the 2005 elections, this result would have given them between 18 and 20 MPs in the 240-seat Parliament. When Lider and Napred parted ways, they did so on good terms, and with Kovachki’s extended arm for co-operation, a possible reunion of the two political forces seems more than likely, especially since the four per cent threshold currently leaves Napred out of Parliament.