In what could be his last TV appearance before the July 5 elections, Prime Minister and leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), Sergei Stanishev, said the campaign had been marked by smear tactics and a lack of fresh ideas.

Stanishev, who appeared on the morning show of private national broadcaster bTV, said that his opponents had failed to present ideas on how to rule the country and had also displayed ignorance about how to achieve good results.

Some of them have also had a hidden agenda, he said, referring to two of the right-wing political forces, Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov's party, the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (abbreviated as GERB in Bulgarian) and the Blue Coalition of Ivan Kostov and Martin Dimitrov.

According to Stanishev, although both forces were running separately at the elections, they planned to rule together.

All surveys show that GERB will win the largest share of seat in the 240-seat Parliament or about 30 per cent of the votes with the BSP coming second with about 20 per cent.

This, however, would not be enough for GERB to form its own government. Hence, many analysts put the Blue Coalition together with one of the smaller right-wing parties in a GERB-dominated coalition cabinet.

This has been BSP's main election message in the last week of the campaign where a BSP election TV spot shows Borissov as former prime minister Ivan Kostov's route back to power.

Kostov has been one of the BSP's harshest opponents ever since the late 1990s when he came to power after the BSP had presided over a period of economic crisis.

Because of Borissov's and Kostov's alleged plot to rule together after the elections, Stanishev said that the BSP's election campaign was not a bad PR stunt but, instead, something which stated a fact.

"People should know that Borissov cannot rule without Kostov and that by voting for GERB people will bring Kostov back to power," he said.

Stanishev also criticised some of his opponents' ideas about Bulgaria signing a safeguard agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a way of protecting the country's stability amid the worsening economic crisis.

"Countries who sign such agreements are those who cannot cope with the crisis themselves and, at this stage, Bulgaria is not one of them," he said. "Secondly, no one is reflecting on the consequences of such an agreement for the Bulgarian people. The first thing the IMF will ask from us is to freeze public sector salaries and cut state administration."

Stanishev said that the BSP was the only party that had declared its intentions about the level of salaries, pensions and unemployment and the funding of small and medium-sized businesses.