Fourteen members of Parliament, who in recent days were either expelled from or quit their membership of Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP), have formed their own parliamentary group called Bulgarian New Democracy (BND).

The group includes a former deputy prime minister and two former cabinet ministers.

On December 5, the group told Parliament that its chairperson would be Borislav Ralchev, with be Tatyana Kalkanova and Valentin Miltenov as his deputies.

Eleven MPs left the NMSP on November 27 and 28, after the NMSP parliamentary group expelled former deputy prime minister Plamen Panayotov, Borislav Ralchev, Borislav Velikov, Vladimir Donchev and Atanas Shterev for disloyalty towards the official policy of the party.

In just four days, the five MPs were joined voluntarily by former defence minister Nikolai Svinarov, former economy minister Lydia Shouleva, Vanya Tsvetkova, Tatyana Kalkanova, Valentin Miltenov, Ilko Dimitrov, Krastanka Shaklian, Boiko Noev and Svetoslav Spasov.

On December 5, BND chairperson Ralchev told Parliament that the reason for the split from the NMSP was “the undemocratic and even repressive methods which the NMSP has been using lately”.

This was an apparent reference to NMSP leader and former prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg personally having proposed that the five MPs be expelled.

Tensions within the NMSP, which was the majority party in government from 2001 until 2005 and now is a minority partner in the coalition Cabinet, emerged in public at a party congress in July this year. A new leadership was elected, with none of the 14 MPs who now form the BND group included in it. Some later alleged that the congress had been “manipulated” by a group of people close to former finance minister Milen Velchev.

A court application was lodged against the decisions of the congress, including its new leadership corps and the move to change its name from the National Movement Simeon II to the NMSP. With the court process still pending, the party’s name technically continues to be the NMSII.

The BND 14 said that they had no plans to set up a political party.

“We have time until 2009 when the next regular elections for Parliament are to be held, to decide whether the BND project has a future,” Panayotov told journalists.

Given that the NMSP is part of the ruling coalition together with the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, Ralchev said that the BND would not be part of the ruling majority.

However, when the majority’s policy was in line with the BND’s criteria and principles, the new group would support it, Ralchev said. He did not describe the BND’s principles in detail, but said that the new group would be positioned in the centre-right spectrum. The NMSP identifies itself as a liberal party.

The formation of the BND will not threaten the numerical superiority of the ruling coalition. Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev, who is also leader of the BSP, will have a total of 154 coalition majority MPs out of the 240 seats in Parliament. Even if further MPs move to the BND, as Ralchev and others have said will happen, the total number of defections is unlikely to make anything larger than a small dent in the majority’s numbers. After he quit the NMSP, Spasov said that he expected the total number of MPs to leave would finally add up to 20.

The limited number of departures, and the fact of the BND saying that it would support the Cabinet where matters of principle were in alignment, means that there is no serious threat to the majority in Parliament.

However, it appears that the formation of the BND could change the share-out of seats in the coalition Cabinet. When the Government was formed in 2005, the BSP had 82 MPs, NMSP 53 and the MRF 34. The coalition agreement based on the number of seats held by each party gave the BSP eight Cabinet seats, NMSP five and MRF three. As at December 5, the BSP had 82 MPs, the MRF 34 while the NMSP has shrunk to 38. If the NMSP loses four more, this will be enough for the MRF to ask for a new agreement that will give the party more representation in the Cabinet.

Another sensitive issue for the NMSP is parliamentary committees. Again based on the 2005 election results, the NMSP has the second largest number of chairperson and deputy chairperson seats after the BSP. Two BND MPs, Svinarov and Spasov are chairpersons of the committee on national security and public order, and the sports and youth committee, respectively.

“It is best for BND MPs to remain in their positions although we are not part of NMSP any more, because they had proven themselves to be good professionals,” Ralchev said.

Milen Velchev, elected deputy chairperson of the NMSP at the July congress, said that morality required that the BND 14 resign from Parliament.

The founding of the BND means that there are now eight parliamentary groups. It is not the first time that a group has broken away from the NMSP. When the party was in government as the NMSII, a small group left to form Novoto Vreme (The New Time). This group won no seats in the 2005 parliamentary elections, and came effectively nowhere in the 2007 MEP and municipal elections.