Prime Minister Boiko Borissov remains Bulgaria’s most popular public figure but the political dramas that shook the country in January – including the Roumyana Zheleva saga – appear to have cost him points, going by a survey by the Mediana polling agency.
 
Borissov’s approval rating was 62 per cent, down four points on the previous month.
 
Second-most popular was President Georgi Purvanov, with whom Borissov has clashed in public but whose high approval rating has had Purvanov consistently near the top of polls for several years, long before Borissov entered politics.
 
Just two points behind Purvanov’s 53 points was Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Deputy Prime Minister and Interior Minister and deputy leader of Borissov’s party, GERB.
 
According to the Mediana Agency poll, published on February 8 2010 by Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily Trud, the biggest winner from the January drama – which, among other events, saw Zheleva withdraw as Bulgaria’s European Commissioner-designate and as foreign minister – was Zheleva’s successor at the Foreign Ministry, Nikolai Mladenov, who before then was defence minister.
 
The poll emerged against a background of generally strong results for Borissov and GERB in the months since it gained the most votes in Bulgaria’s July 2009 national parliamentary elections.
 
At the elections, which led to Borissov forming a Cabinet made up solely of GERB members and declining to form a broader governing coalition, his party got about 41 per cent of the vote.
 
In mid-August 2009, Gallup said that were elections to be held then, GERB would get an even larger slice of the seats in Parliament and, according to the polling agency, Borissov’s approval rating had climbed after he became Prime Minister.
 
In early September 2009, polls showed Borissov and GERB still making gains, but a poll taken in mid-December by the ASSA-M agency said that GERB had shed about seven per cent of its support, although that support did not seem to have transferred to other parties.