site.btaBulgarian Expats in Turkey Prepare for Bulgarian October 2 Snap Elections

Kocaeli province has a compact population of expatriates from Bulgaria and 10 voting sections are expected to be opened for the October 2 snap elections, said Gunay Uzun, Chairman of the Balkan Turks Association for Culture and Cooperation (Bal-Turk).

At the moment, the most important task is to ensure that the mandatory applications of the eligible voters for participation in the procedure are filled by the deadline of September 6, he added.

Timely filling of the applications by people with dual citizenship is very important to avoid long queues on election day and hours of waiting, the people from the association explain. Quite a number of the younger generation, whose parents are Bulgarian citizens and have acquired their citizenship by origin, have already submitted their applications.

This will be the 15th vote for parliamentary elections in Kocaeli and Uzun expects an even larger turnout than at the last elections in 2021.

While the people in Kocaeli want to finally see a stable government elected in Bulgaria, they also insist that the problems of compatriots should be solved and their economic situation  - improved, Uzun said.

Voting sections are expected to be opened in Gebze, Cayirova, Darica, Derince, Korfez, Izmit and Karamursel.

While out-of-the-country voting applications are not mandatory, they play an important role in overseas voting. First, having more than 40 voter applications can lead to the opening of a new voting section. Second, it steps up the voting process because voters who have submitted applications will have their names and details included in the voting registers in advance and that will cut the long wait. And last but not least, the number of applications is indicative of the activity of a given community of expatriate Bulgarians, according to out-of-the-country voting activist Boyan Yurukov.

The glasuvam.org platform in support of out-of-the-country voting shows that in the last elections (for President and Parliament, November 2021), the applications that were submitted by voters in Turkey ahead of voting day totalled 21,844 and the total number of applications from all Bulgarian communities abroad was 56,870.