Boiko Borissov, leader of the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, the party poised to win the largest share of votes in Bulgaria’s July 5 2009 national parliamentary elections, has poured scorn on the idea on an "expert cabinet" being formed if no party is able to form a ruling coalition.
 
Speaking in an interview with bTV’s breakfast show on July 3, Borissov repeated the message that he and party chairperson Tsvetan Tsvetanov have been emphasising in recent days, that GERB (as the party is known in Bulgarian) wants an election victory decisive enough to rule without the need for a coalition.
 
In media interviews, Borissov has said that unless GERB wins an outright majority or cannot achieve a coalition agreement with the centre-right Blue Coalition, it will return to the President the formal invitation to form a government.
 
All recent opinion polls have seen GERB winning the most votes, followed by current Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev’s Bulgarian Socialist Party-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria.
 
On June 26, Tsvetanov said that GERB did not want to form a coalition with any of the parties in the current tripartite ruling coalition. The other two parties now in the Cabinet are Ahmed Dogan’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress.
 
A number of commentators have expressed the view that it may prove very difficult if not impossible for consensus to be reached on a government after the election, and some have suggested that an "expert" cabinet, otherwise referred to as a "programme cabinet" may have to be formed to run Bulgaria on a caretaker basis.
 
On July 3, mass-circulation daily Trud quoted Yulli Pavlov of the Centre for Analysis and Marketing as saying that there was no workable option for a cabinet to be formed.
 
Konstantin Trenchev, leader of the Podkrepa labour confederation, told the same newspaper that attempts to form a cabinet could fail and a caretaker cabinet would have to take over pending elections around the New Year.
 
Few voices in mainstream parties have been raised in public in favour of an "expert" cabinet. On June 26, daily Standart quoted the BSP’s Georgi Kadiev as saying that the best thing for the country would be a programme cabinet.
 
However, BSP leader Sergei Stanishev has cast doubt on the idea, saying on June 29, as quoted by Bulgarian news agency Focus, that while the idea might sound attractive, "Who will take responsibility for this government, which would have to take hard decisions?"
 
Speaking to bTV on July 3, Borissov was contemptuous of the expert cabinet idea, saying that in reality, there was no such thing as an expert cabinet.
 
If it was not possible to form a coalition, his party would want fresh elections in August, Borissov said.
 
Ivan Kostov, co-founder of the Blue Coalition, who has indicated willingess – if not unconditionally – to serve with GERB in a governing coalition, has repeatedly rejected the idea of an expert cabinet, telling daily Novinar on July 2 that this would be "the worst evil" that could happen to Bulgaria after the elections.
 
On July 2, Trud said that were fresh elections to be held because of an inability to form a governing coalition, the risk would be that such elections would simply replicate the results of the July 5 vote.
 
The formation of an expert cabinet appeared to a more acceptable scenario, because it would allow more time for a stalemate to be resolved and would allow such a cabinet to go ahead with anti-crisis measures, but had the downside of a lack of accountability for failure, Trud said.