Bulgaria municipal elections - Several cities elect mayor in first round

01:00 Mon 29 Oct 2007

Reporting by the sofiaecho.com elections team - Petar Kostadinov, Elitsa Grancharova, Elena Koinova, Elitsa Savova, Rene Beekman, Clive Leviev-Sawyer and Magdalena Rahn

When results from the municipal elections started coming in on October 28, it became clear that Sofia, Kurdjali, Plovdiv and Varna had re-elected their current mayors in the first round.

In Sofia, Boiko Borissov (GERB) was re-elected with a little more than 50 per cent.

Independent candidate, backed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and current mayor of Varna, Kiril Yordanov won in the first round with about 54 per cent.

In Plovdiv, current mayor Slavcho Atanasov of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) and GERB was re-elected with about 56 per cent.

Pleven Mayor Naiden Zelenogorski was almost certain to have been elected for a third term with about 57% of the vote, BTA said.

Kurdjali mayor Hassan Azis of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, received 57 per cent of the vote.

In the town of Chavdar, BSP candidate Pencho Gerov won 50 per cent plus 15 votes, BTA quoted the chairwoman of the municipal election committee Violeta Neshkova as saying.

In Blagoevgrad the second round will be between the candidate of Coalition Democratic Alliance and Ataka, Radoslav Taskov and BSP candidate Kostadin Naskalev. The two received 27.5 and 27.3 per cent of the votes respectively.