The “rebellion” started on December 5 when newly elected Bulgarian New Democracy (BND) chairman Borislav Ralchev said that the reason that BND MPs had left the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP) was “the undemocratic and even repressive methods which the NMSP has been using lately”.

This was enough for the Bulgarian-language media to tag the BND as the group of the rebels, a label which the BND has always disliked.

Rebels or not, as of January 18 the BND became the biggest opposition group in Parliament.

Despite this, the ruling coalition, in which the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) are the other partners, can still muster a strong majority of 151 MPs in the 240-seat Parliament.

However, the fact that all BND MPs formerly were with the NMSP immediately raised the question about where they would locate themselves in the parliamentary spectrum, and furthermore, whether they would support a motion of no confidence in the Cabinet.

The reality in Parliament, however, gives the BND little choice. On the left, the senior ruling partner, the BSP, has 85 MPs, and in the centre the NMSP has 35 MPs and the MRF 34. Elsewhere are the 11 ultra-nationalist MPs of the Ataka party and 15 independent MPs. The rest of the MPs (46) occupy the right corner, separated in three groups.
Predictably, the first comments the BND made were about the policy they will follow. Since the NMSP defines itself as a liberal party, the BND had to either proclaim themselves as the new liberal alternative or find a completely new image, meaning a right-wing image. At first, BND took the first approach.

On December 8, Plamen Panayotov, a hitherto key figure in the NMSP, called his former party “a project that has come to an end”, meaning that what NMSP once was, the BND could be today. The same view was offered BND chairman Ralchev.

“The NMSP is not my idea of a liberal party,” Ralchev said in his first interview as BND floor leader, given to Bulgarian-language Dnevnik daily.

In the first two weeks following the birth of the BND on December 5, Ralchev and his colleagues talked only about why they had left the NMSP, saying that the main reason was the way that NMSP leader Simeon Saxe-Coburg handled the party.

They said little or nothing about the policy conducted by the Cabinet in which the NMSP participates, an omission that suggested that the dispute was all about internal conflicts within the NMSP.

There was a simple explanation. On December 5, BND had just 14 MPs, making them the second-smallest group in Parliament. On January 18, when BND became the fourth largest group, things changed. Suddenly the BND MPs said plainly that they were implacably in opposition to the Government.

BND proposed to the other opposition parties to form a joint opposition to the ruling majority. The first message came from BND’s Lydia Shouleva on January 23. She told journalists that the BND could serve as the driving force behind right-wing unity, at least at parliamentary level. She even had a word for the party led by Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov, GERB, which is represented in Parliament solely by Luchezar Ivanov, another former NMSP MP. (Even though GERB has taken the most significant shares of votes in the two most recent elections and claims to be the pre-eminent political force in Bulgaria, it was founded only after the 2005 parliamentary elections and so has no MPs elected on its ticket.)

On February 7, BND’s Svetoslav Spassov went even further than Shouleva. In an interview with Bulgarian news agency Focus, Spassov revealed BND’s plan to form a political party under the same name, a subject carefully avoided in public until then.

“We should form a political party, but before that we should form a citizens’ movement so that people can express their support for us all around Bulgaria,” Spassov said. May was the deadline for this movement, he said. “We should not only rely on our MPs, but we should also try to attract the support of other right-wing MPs who share the idea of the new democracy,” Spassov said. The focus of BND policy would be on people outside Sofia “because they have been neglected by all of the governments who had as their priority Bulgaria joining the EU and Nato,” Spassov said.

The BND party was to be formed by people united by the right-wing idea and could serve as GERB’s ruling partner in the next Parliament.

“We are ready to rule with GERB,” Spassov said. His logic was simple. All surveys show that GERB would have the most seats in Parliament next year, but not enough to form a ruling majority. The surveys say that the BSP will be second, followed by the MRF. Given the NMSP’s devastating results in the most recent two elections, surveys give the NMSP a minor role in Bulgaria’s political life.

Because GERB defines itself as a right-wing party, the current right-wing parties in Parliament will face a tough fight to get the support of right-wing voters.

“Because of this, the right wing should be united in order to have the chance to rule with GERB,” Spassov said.

Unfortunately for him and for the rest of the BND, the current right-wing parties, Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB), the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) and Bulgarian People’s Union (BPU) have shown little attention to the signals coming from BND.

Furthermore, with the exception of the DSB who rely on a hard core of support that, depending on voter turnout, could give it seats in Parliament, the UDF and the BPU have started their own talks with GERB on a possible partnership. If this happens, the BND project could crash before takeoff. Because as weak as they could seem at present, all of the traditional right-wing parties have something that BND does not: funding, given by the state, regional structures and most of all through representation on local level in hundreds of municipal councils.

Furthermore, the established right-wing parties have the benefit of having been in opposition for the past eight years, unlike BND MPs, some of whom were cabinet ministers in the 2001-05 Saxe-Coburg government.