site.btaUPDATED BSP Returns Cabinet-Forming Mandate on Tuesday

President Rumen Radev Friday said he would receive on January 24 BSP for Bulgaria representatives who will return an unfulfilled cabinet-forming mandate. After a meeting of the party's Executive Bureau and the BSP for Bulgaria parliamentary group, Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Korneliya Ninova Friday told a briefing she would return the mandate.

Radev presented the third, and last, mandate to BSP for Bulgaria on January 16 after earlier attempts by GERB-UDF and Continue the Change failed.

"We are going to elections - much to my regret, because Bulgaria does not need this," Ninova said, adding that it is for the Bulgarian voters to decide what will happen at the elections and after them.

Asked if it would be reasonable to put off returning the mandate as she had done in a previous parliament because two key bills on judicial reform were being discussed, Ninova said that once the mandate was returned, it was within the President's powers and responsibility to keep Parliament working for as long as he thinks fit.

There is no majority for a regular government, Ninova said after a leaders' meeting in Parliament earlier on Friday. Only three groups - GERB-UDF, Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and Bulgarian Rise - accepted the BSP's invitation for talks. Continue the Change, Democratic Bulgaria and Vazrazhdane did not accept it and did not come to the meeting.

"We took a different approach, we invited all leaders of the parliamentary parties, some accepted, others did not - that's what they chose to do, though this raises many questions," Ninova said.

All parliamentary parties declared that the Recovery and Resilience Plan is the most important task for Bulgaria's future, she said. At the same time, certain parties did not show up for talks on how to form a government so as to have a regular parliament to adopt the laws relating to the Plan, the BSP leader commented.

Asked to comment on statements by Continue the Change co-leader Assen Vassilev and Democratic Bulgaria co-leader Hristo Ivanov, who saw a future government coalition between the BSP and GERB in the next parliament, Ninova said the BSP had seen such a coalition between those two parties and GERB and had dubbed it "a coalition of war". They were not averse to voting with GERB in favour of new aircraft [for the Bulgarian Air Force], arms export to Ukraine and no new budget for 2023, she said.

Commenting on GERB leader Boyko Borissov's statement on Friday that his party could reconsider its decision against supporting the BSP, Ninova said the Socialists were not mulling a reciprocal step.

Asked who would bear responsibility for the failed formation of a government, she said this would be for the people to say at the next elections. She argued that it is manipulative to claim that the holder of the third mandate is to blame - the responsibility rests primarily with the holder of the first, the second, and of course, the third mandate, but since the first and the second one failed, the third should hardly be held responsible.

Bulgaria held snap elections on October 2, 2022.