In-fighting in the Bulgarian Socialist Party ahead of its October 18 congress was leaving the protagonists red in tooth and claw.

Senior members, including former cabinet colleagues of embattled leader Sergei Stanishev, have turned on the ex-prime minister. Former interior minister Roumen Petkov, who lost his job during Stanishev’s term, described him as lacking the qualities to lead the party.

Long-time rival Tatyana Doncheva, reported in Bulgarian-language media to be a strong candidate to succeed Stanishev, described him in a late September television interview as a "helpless boy" and said that it was not for nothing that cartoonists depicted Stanishev as a mouse.

Stanishev, who has led the party since 2002 when his predecessor Georgi Purvanov was elected President of Bulgaria, but who has presided over a succession of election defeats as the BSP was eclipsed by Boiko Borissov’s GERB in European and national parliamentary elections in 2009, has admitted that he should take the blame for the party’s losses.

In an interview published on October 10 by Douma, a daily closely aligned to the BSP, Stanishev admitted blame but took a sideswipe at others in the party. "I am to blame for not saying loudly that only people with reputation and authority in the eyes of the public have a place in politics."

The negative image of individual figures in the BSP had blighted the image of the entire party, Stanishev said.

After the June 2009 parliamentary election defeat, which saw voters boot the party from being the majority partner in government to a minority party trailing a poor second to election victor GERB, there were public calls for Stanishev to step down. He refused, and at a BSP national council meeting in late July won a vote of confidence as leader – an event that skeptics wrote off as meaningless because the national council was packed with a loyal corps of supporters established during his leadership, but, his critics suggest, not representative of the mood elsewhere in the party.

It seemed too that those around Stanishev were fighting a rearguard action against his rivals in various ways. Roumen Ovcharov, a former minister who previously was known to harbour leadership ambitions but who lost out to Stanishev, was the subject of allegations in early October that while economy minister, he had set up secret accounts offshore.

Ovcharov denies the allegations and has said that he will take court action against MP Maria Cappone, who said that in 2006 prosecutors had been aware of the allegations but had done nothing about them.

The noise about the allegations against Ovcharov, however, failed to drown out his repeated call for Stanishev to accept political responsibility for the election failure. On October 7, the Sofia city branch of the BSP met, a gathering that saw Ovcharov quit his long-time post as the capital city’s leader of the party, and the formal nomination of Georgi Kadiev as the BSP candidate for mayor of Sofia in the by-election on November 15. The Kadiev saga, too, has been symptomatic of the troubles in the party. There was a very public battle about the nomination of Kadiev, with Stanishev calling the wisdom of the choice into question, and Kadiev, who briefly was a deputy finance minister under Stanishev, saying that he did not want his party leader’s endorsement.

Speaking after the Sofia meeting to Bulgarian news agency Focus, Kadiev said that the chaotic sniping within the BSP was hindering his chances in the Sofia mayoral election, and underlined that among "the news" from the Sofia meeting was the fact that Stanishev had not resigned.

With the approach of the October 18 congress, the calls for him to step down have returned with a new stridency, but Stanishev’s demise as leader was no means certain, for procedural reasons.

The question of the party leadership is not on the congress agenda. Party spokesperson Kornelia Nikolova said that opinions were divided among party lawyers about whether it could be added to the agenda by vote at the congress. Those who believed that the leadership issue could not be put on the agenda said that, for it to be there, two months’ notice should have been given.

Focus quoted Krassimir Premyanov, leader of an anti-Stanishev faction called the Open Forum, as saying that decisions about agendas of congresses should be guided by political, not legal considerations.

The question, however, may end up being dealt with by lawyers. Doncheva, in an interview published on October 12 by mass-circulation daily Trud, said that there was no time to delay the decision. Other media reports suggested that, if the October 18 congress did not include the leadership question on its agenda, Doncheva and former interior minister Mihail Mikov would take the BSP congress to court.

A simple way for the issue to be on the agenda would be for Stanishev to have resigned. But, in the final days before the event, it was a prospect that seemed, if not impossible, certainly remote.