With 127 votes in favour, Bulgaria's Parliament approved on January 27 2010 the appointment of Nikolai Mladenov as the country's new Foreign Minister. Mladenov moves to the new post after having been Defence Minister.

Parliament also approved the promotion of Mladenov's deputy at the Defence Ministry, Anyu Angelov, to Defence Minister.

Sixty-nine MPs from two former ruling parties, the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, voted against the proposed changes.

MPs from the third party in opposition, the Order, Law and Justice party, were absent from Parliament and did not take part in the vote.

The vote was hardly a surprise as Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s ruling party GERB has 116 seats in the 240-seat National Assembly. The Union of Democratic Forces and the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, the two major partners in the right-wing Blue Coalition, which has a total of 15 votes, had announced earlier that they would support the appointments, as had ultra-nationalist party Ataka, which has 21 votes.

Sergei Stanishev announced the previous day that his Coalition for Bulgaria (40 MPs), which is dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, would vote against the changes. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms, formerly the socialists’ partner in government and which has 38 MPs, also said that it would vote against.

The sole aspect welcomed by the opposition parties that said that they would vote against the two appointments was the departure from the foreign affairs portfolio of Roumyana Zheleva, who resigned after the January 12 2010 European Commission hearings that brought about her political eclipse.
 
Some time in April, Parliament will vote on a third Cabinet appointment, that of Ilian Mihov, the macro-economics professor who has been named by Borissov as the country’s future Deputy Prime Minister with an economics and finance portfolio.