Bulgaria PM: Everybody Wants to Impeach President Parvanov

PM Borisov has made it clear he was in a delicate position as his decision on the potential impeachment of President Parvanov may be the decisive factor for the success of any such move. Photo by BGNES

All major Bulgarian political parties except for the Socialist Party and the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) want to impeach President Georgi Parvanov.

This has been stated Tuesday by Bulgaria’s Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, during his visit to Berlin, Germany, where he participated in the celebrations for the 20th Year since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“I am now in a very delicate situation. My colleagues from the other parties are insisting increasingly on impeaching Parvanov. It is high time that 20 years after the changes (i.e. the end of Bulgaria’s communist regime – editor’s note), those people be gone from the government of the country, that they get lost, and that all those fabricated scandals are put an end to,” declared Borisov as cited by BGNES, referring to the fact that the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which Parvanov chaired in 1997-2002 before being elected President is the descendant of the former Communist Party.

Borisov defended his government’s decisions to demand that President Parvanov recall Bulgaria’s Ambassadors to the USA and Turkey over violations they permitted during the voting in the respective countries in the July 2009 Parliamentary Elections.

Parvanov has refused to recall the two Ambassadors, Lachezar Petkov and Branimir Mladenov, saying there was not sufficient evidence of any violations.

“We have recalled them because of disciplinary violations, and we will continue to recall ambassadors over violations because we are responsible. I am convinced that the ambassadors in question are guilty of many violations,” Borisov has said.

“Parvanov is the person who constructed the three-way coalition (which governed in 2005-2009 – editor’s note), and his feeling of guilt will never disappear. Every single day there are new charges against former officials making it more and more clear that the three-way coalition ruled Bulgaria in a horrible manner. One day Parvanov is defending the guilty ex-PM Sergey Stanishev, then the other day Stanishev is defending Parvanov. And Dogan (the leader of the ethnic Turkish party DPS – editor’s note) is joining in from Kardzhali with his mani (a Turkish folklore song – editor’s notes),” Borisov declared referring to the fact that Dogan’s DPS was a major ally of the Socialist Party in the former governing three-way coalition.

According to Borisov, all corruption and embezzlement violation were carried out by “the same clique”, which is now trying to pressure the judicial system and the prosecutors, and is also trying to use media outlets in order to generate made-up scandals.

“If I were in the President’s place, I would give some serious thought to last year’s snow. BGN 132 M were embezzlement, allegedly for snow-cleaning. For four years I never heard Parvanov speak out against the actual thieves. We are striking the these bandit scams one by one, and were are counteracted by very serious forces that are losing money from the fact that we are cutting off their schemes and channels for stealing public funds. Last year’s snow is one of those schemes. Some of the others are the agriculture, the railways, the forest plots, the Labor Ministry, and every other ministry for that matter,” Borisov concluded.

The question about whether Parvanov should be impeached has recently been raised by the rightist Blue Coalition and the nationalist Ataka party – both allies of Borisov’s ruling GERB party.

On Monday, the rightist party Democrats for Strong Bulgaria of Ivan Kostov demanded that Parvanov be impeached if evidence was found that he was involved in violations by Bulgarian companies in the UN Oil for Food program for Iraq in the late 1990s.

At the same time, the nationalist Ataka party has demanded that Parvanov be impeached over failing to inform the Parliament of all of his actions, as stipulated by Article 14 of the Constitution.

Together with a third ally, the conservatives from RZS, the center-right majority led by GERB has a total of 164 MPs, or over two-thirds of the seats in the 240-seat Parliament, which could potentially allow it to impeach Parvanov.

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