On May 29 Stefan Sofianski leader of the right-wing Union of Free Democrats (UFD) told private bTV he was quitting the leadership of the party and politics in general. This was the third consecutive resignation of a right-wing leader after Bulgaria's May 20 European Parliament (EP) elections. The three right-wing parties, the UFD, Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) and Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB) were left without representation in the EP. On May 21, DSB leader Ivan Kostov resigned, to be followed a day later by UDF leader Petar Stoyanov. Each of the three leaders gave two reasons for their resignations. First, the election defeats which showed people’s lack of support for the current right-wing parties. The second was the need for young faces that could unite the right-wing in the way that it was in the late 1990s. Speculation about the who these “new faces” would be started surfacing. The situation is least clear with the UDF. The choice is most likely to be between Plovdiv mayor Ivan Chomakov and Martin Dimitrov.
Chomakov is a household name for UDF supporters in Plovdiv and has the reputation of a “true democrat”. He is more familiar within the hard core of UDF supporters. Dimitrov, on the other hand, is part of the new faces in Bulgarian politics in general. He became a UDF member and MP in 2005, after a personal invitation from the UDF’s then leader, Nadezhda Mihailova. Dimitrov came in as an expert from the NGO Institute of Market Economics. His active work as an MEP made him popular in the media but he is practically an outsider to the UDF supporters with no right-wing background.
The UDF will name its new leader on July 15.
The question of Kostov’s successor is not clear either. So far not a single name has come out in the media, which is partially because Kostov’s resignation has to be approved by the party’s congress in the autumn which might leave Kostov a chance to come back as leader.
As for the smallest of the three parties, the UFD, Sofianski’s resignation might be the biggest problem since he was the only recognisable face of the party.
On May 27 Alexander Bozhkov, former minister in Kostov’s cabinet and popular name from the right-wing, told private Nova Televisia that he had one fear. “I like what the three have done, making place for the young people. My fear is that these young people might not be given a fair chance. For me it is not enough only for the leaders to resign. The entire leadership of the parties should resign because there we see people who have spent more than a decade being deputies in the shadows of the leaders. I fear that they might try to use this opportunity for their own way up.
I hope that the right-wing will be able to find common ground and work again as one, not necessarily in one party”.
Indeed it took Stoyanov, Kostov and Sofianski exactly 10 years after the glorious 1997 to start talk about establishing a common right-wing policy and close co-operation between the three parties. “The right-wing can do well without our old faces; we need new people who can unite right-wing supporters who obviously showed us a red card on election day,” was the message which came from the three leaders who resigned.
In the 1990s there was one major right-wing party, the UDF. The party attracted the support of all those in favour of market economy values and Bulgaria’s democratic development as a member of NATO and the EU. The biggest success of UDF was the government of Ivan Kostov (1997-2001) combined with the presidency of Petar Stoyanov (1997-2002) and Stefan Sofianski’s three terms as Sofia mayor (1995-2005). The return of Bulgaria’s former monarch Simeon Saxe-Coburg and personal conflicts between these three legendary UDF leaders ended in a devastating loss in 2001 at the parliamentary elections. A consequence was Stoyanov's defeat at the 2002 presidential elections. He lost to current President Georgi Purvanov, the then leader of the ideological enemy, the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Instead of finding a solution to the crisis, the leaders followed the principle of every leader with a party. While Stoyanov remained as UDF member and later UDF’s chairman (in 2006), Kostov formed his DSB and Sofianski his UFD, giving right-wing Bulgarians not one but three choices. The result was a series of elections losses, the latest this year on May 20. Since 1997 the right-wing parties failed at every election in the country.
