From Daniela Gortcheva: The situation at the moment, though, can be called “state capture”. Ms de POURBAIX-LUNDIN (Sweden): In was in Bulgaria pre-election in April and for the election in May, and I could really feel the suspicion in the air. It brought to my mind the Elvis Presley song “Suspicious Minds” and the lyric, “we can’t build our dreams on suspicious minds”. It is not a dream but reality that needs to be built in Bulgaria, and that cannot be done on suspicious minds. There is suspicion everywhere – among politicians, and between politicians and citizens – and as we politicians know, confidence can be lost in one second but it takes much longer to regain it. The President of Bulgaria, whom we met several times, has wisely said that no politician should promise more than they can deliver. He tried to handle the situation, and the caretaker government tried to make the best of it. Before election day, we heard a lot about vote buying and controlled voting, with people trying to force others to vote in a particular way. That is hard to prove, of course, but there was discussion about the voters list, which contained the names of about 800 000 people who were no longer in Bulgaria. Nobody knows whether someone else tried to vote in their name, and it is a challenge to deal with that. The suspicion that exists can also be seen in the fact that the turnout was as low as 51% and in the strange fact that when we asked some national observers which party they represented, they said “I don’t want to tell you.” Of course, I observed things that were not good, but I will not go into that. Bulgaria now has a socialist-liberal government, but thousands of people are back on the streets and we do not know whether there will be a new election in a couple of months. Bulgaria needs stability. We wish it the best, but we may have to go there for more election observation pretty soon. assembly.coe.int/Main.asp?link=%2FDocuments%2FRecords%2F2013%2FE%2F1306241130E.htm
Posted on: Thu, 27 Jun 2013 21:15:48 +0000