A day before a visit by European enlargement commissioner Olli Rehn to Bulgaria, a group of right-wing opposition parties in Parliament requested a motion of no confidence in the Cabinet.
The parties said that the Government had shown incompetence in dealing with the floods that have hit Bulgaria in recent months, and that there had been corruption in the use of funds allocated for repairing flood damage.
Seventy-one opposition MPs supported the tabling of the motion. Forty-eight were needed for it to enter Parliament. The three ruling parties - the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), the National Movement Simeon II (NMSII), and the MRF, will debate the vote at a special session on April 18. The opposition is to demand that the Government reports to Parliament on how it has spent the 250 million leva allocated for dealing with flood damage.
We directly accuse the ministers from the MRF of corruption, and the rest in shielding them under a political umbrella, said the deputy head of the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB), Vesselin Metodiev.
The Government, with the mandate of the MRF, is the source and protector of corruption. The tripartite coalition, and mainly (MRF leader) Ahmed Dogans ministers, abused the funds that the state allocated for people affected by floods. The money went not to the affected citizens, but to the ring of firms around Dogan, the parties said in a memorandum explaining their request for the motion of no confidence.
They said that the criminal activities of the MRF were shielded under the political umbrella of Interior Minister Roumen Petkov, an opinion expressed by DSB leader Ivan Kostov earlier in April, when discussions about the vote were still brewing.
DSB deputy leader Ekaterina Mihailova said on April 12 that justice and home affairs, the areas most harshly criticised in the preliminary April 3 European Commission report, needed an urgent reshuffling. She said that Interior Minister Petkov and Justice Minister Georgi Petkanov should be replaced. If it did this, the Cabinet would prove its willingness to solve problems, she said.
Minutes after the right-wing parties presented the vote in Parliament, United Democratic Forces chief secretary Ivan Kolchakov said that President Georgi Purvanov should participate in the debate on the no confidence vote because he had devoted considerable political resources to the current tripartite coalition.
The motion has less than scant chance of success because the ruling coalition has a two-thirds majority in Parliament.
Eleonora Nikolova, a member of the National Executive Council of the UDF, said that since it could not count on success, the right-wing opposition would use the preliminary debates to prove that the Government had been criminally inactive in dealing with the floods. She said that it was high time for right-wing parties to prove that they were capable of co-ordinating their actions because they intended to come up with a joint candidate for President in this years election, Nikolova said.
Responding to the call for a Cabinet reshuffle, Labour and Social Policy Minister Emilia Maslarova said that there would be nothing surprising in a spring reshuffle, but that this was not a topical issue at the moment.
At the moment the Cabinet has a huge amount of work to do. Many commissioners and European observers are in the country. Tabling a no confidence vote against the Cabinet at this moment is not normal. But each opposition has its own ways.
The BSP executive bureau said that Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev opposed any change to the Cabinet before January 1.
Stanishev said that the oppositions move was deliberately chosen to coincide with Rehns visit, and said that the motion would harm the image of Bulgaria in the eyes of its European partners.
The tabling of the vote coincides with a flood of negative media coverage in Western media about Bulgaria and Romanias EU entry in 2007, mostly centring on organised crime infiltration of the political elite in both countries.
Last week, the European Parliament rapporteur on Bulgaria, Geoffrey van Orden, said that the achievements of the two countries could be looked at in two ways - for some the cup was half full, for others, half empty. A member of the Greens, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, said that the question was not whether it was half empty or half full, but whether it was poisonous, reported German magazine Der Spiegel.
The final report on the two countries is due on May 16. According to a report in Bulgarian-language newspaper Standart, citing what it said were sources in the BSP, Bulgaria will be accepted with not one, but a number of safeguard clauses, in the areas of justice and home affairs, agriculture, environment, and intellectual property.
On April 4, Kostov said that Bulgarias admission to the EU in 2007 with a safeguard clause would be a complete failure. He said that it was a pity that Romania had overtaken Bulgaria in its preparations for entry. The activation of a safeguard clause would mean that Bulgaria was being punished and sent to the safeguard clause insulator, Kostov said.
