Two of the key questions around Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov’s party the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, widely expected to get the largest share of votes in the country’s July 5 2009 elections, are by just how wide a margin it will win, and with which parties it will form a coalition.
 
Further, given the changing fortunes of parties in parliamentary elections in recent history – the Union of Democratic Forces won in 1997, to be ousted by a strong showing in June 2001 for Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement Simeon II (now the National Movement for Stability and Progress) and the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s taking of the largest share of votes in 2005 – there is interest in which Bulgarians are hitching their electoral stars to the Borissov bandwagon.
 
According to a June 17 2009 report in Bulgarian daily Dnevnik, based on research done in a joint project with Alfa Research, the hard core of Borissov’s electorate is middle class, aged 40 to 50, live in Sofia or other major cities, have high school or university education, are employed, with average incomes.
 
The report said that Borissov’s party (known by its Bulgarian abbreviation as GERB) which won just more than 24 per cent of the vote in Bulgaria’s European Parliament elections on June 7, now had support that included voters that it had attracted from across the political spectrum, left and right.
 
Borissov, around whom the party was formed after he quit as Interior Ministry chief secretary and broke with Saxe-Coburg’s party, has declined to confirm whether he would be prepared to be Prime Minister.
 
Few believe that GERB will win a majority in the National Assembly sufficient to govern without the need for a coalition.
 
In a report on June 16, mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa quoted Sova Harris’s Vassil Tonchev and Afis agency’s Yuri Aslanov as saying that voter turnout in the national parliamentary elections would be higher than that in the European Parliament elections, when it was about 38 per cent, and GERB would be the main beneficiary, with an additional estimated 300 000 votes.
 
In a separate report three days earlier, Tonchev predicted that GERB would increase its share of the vote by about 10 per cent.
 
The party is also fielding majoritarian candidates, because the parliamentary elections will see MPs elected through a mixed system of proportional representation and first-past-the-post. On June 13, GERB chairman Tsvetan Tsvetanov said that 10 GERB MPs elected through the majoritarian vote would be a good result.
 
Interviewed on June 13 by daily Monitor, Mediana polling agency director Kolyo Kolev said that voter turnout in the July 5 elections would be from 50 to 55 per cent and would see the Bulgarian Socialist Party narrow the gap between itself and GERB.
 
The BSP could even manage to get the most votes if it could mobilise its electorate, according to Kolev, but people who wanted change would likely choose GERB.
 
The BSP currently is the majority partner in the tripartite governing coalition formed in 2005 with Sergei Stanishev as Prime Minister and with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Saxe-Coburg’s NMSP as minority partners.
 
Borissov has been keen to distance himself and his party from the current political establishment, but at least some analysts say that a governing coalition after the July 2005 elections would be made up of GERB and the BSP as the largest partners.
 
This view was expressed in a July 13 interview with daily Pari by social analyst Boryana Dimitrova, who said that she did not rule out a GERB-BSP coalition cabinet.
 
A day earlier, BSP Sofia leader Roumen Ovcharov told 24 Chassa that the BSP would hold talks with any party, just as Borissov would, notwithstanding Borissov’s statements to the contrary.
 
The same day, NMSP economic adviser Vladimir Karolev was quoted as having told daily Novinar that a GERB-BSP-NMSP coalition was likely, and would reflect a parliamentary majority of 75 per cent of MPs.
 
"Such a coalition may sound impossible now, but under a crisis a stable majority and good government are very important," Karolev was reported to have said.
 
But on June 17, GERB chairperson Tsvetanov, speaking to 24 Chassa, said that the party would not form a coalition with the BSP or the MRF – Ahmed Dogan’s party, led and supported in the main by Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent – no matter what the July 5 election results were.
 
Tsvetanov said that a GERB government would conduct a full review of the actions of the current Government, while in recent weeks, and somewhat more melodramatically, Borissov vowed that anyone in the current administration complicit in corruption or other misdeeds would be pursued "into jail".

Currently, GERB is not linked to any other party in the run-up to the parliamentary elections. After the European Parliament vote, talks were held between GERB and the Blue Coalition, the formation made up of two centre-right parties. These came to nothing, reportedly because Borissov made demands that Blue Coalition leaders could not accept.