A day after Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov won a landslide victory at the July 5 general elections, he started making appointments and asked outgoing Prime Minister and leader of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) Sergei Stanishev to restrain himself from doing so.

The 116 seats that Borissov’s party GERB won in the 240-seat Parliament gave him sufficient reason to designate himself Bulgaria’s prime minister-elect. His first decision was to confirm former World Bank top economist Simeon Dyankov as Finance Minister.

In the first few days, Borissov avoided specifying the names of future cabinet ministers, citing ongoing negotiations with the right-wing Blue Coalition, but Dyankov’s name came out on July 6 while Borissov was speaking to a Dow Jones reporter. The appointment was hardly a surprise given that it was because of Borissov and the elections that Dyankov had decided to come back to Bulgaria and the party’s economic team.

The next name came two days later when, after meeting Prosecutor-General Borissov Velchev, Borissov told reporters that his right-hand man since the days Borissov was chief secretary of Interior Ministry, current chairperson of GERB Tsvetan Tsvetanov, would be Interior Minister. This was no surprise.

As for the rest of his ministers, whose names Borissov said he already had in mind, he asked the media to stop all speculation until he was ready to give President Georgi Purvanov the full list. This can happen after July 14 when Purvanov will convene the newly-elected  Parliament and will designate Borissov to form a cabinet. Borissov’s main message after the elections was that Bulgaria needed a cabinet as soon as possible so that it could start addressing the ongoing economic crisis in Bulgaria.

Besides cabinet appointments, Borissov faces at least two other decisions.

First, a candidate for the mayoral elections in Sofia. The city will need a new mayor after Borissov becomes prime minister. The Municipal Election Commission already set the date of October 24 for the mayoral elections. In the previous two elections for Sofia, Borissov stood alone, but if he forms a coalition government with the Blue Coalition, a possible union for the elections would be scant surprise, especially since both ultra-nationalist Ataka party and the right-wing Order, Law and Justice party, both of which got into Parliament, vowed their support for him.

The other choice Borissov and his cabinet would have to make is Bulgaria’s candidate European Commissioner. Currently this post is held by highly popular Meglena Kouneva, who has the consumer protection portfolio. Kouneva won a seat in the European Parliament at the June 7 elections but has hinted that she would like to continue as a Commissioner. After her party, the National Movement for Stability and Progress, failed to win any National Assembly seats, she lost any real chance of staying on in the EC, especially since Borissov said on July 7 that "Kouneva has already chosen to be an MEP".

Next on Borissov’s  list seems to be Ivan Iskrov, governor of Bulgarian National Bank. The Stanishev Cabinet re-appointed Iskrov in June, although his current term expires in six months.

 "He (Iskrov) should have come to me first and presented his programme, not just waited around," Borissov said after the elections and called Iskrov’s reappointment illegal. Despite the support Iskrov got from Purvanov, on July 8 Borissov said "for me Iskrov’s terms ends after six months".