Bulgarian Socialists Move to Eradicate Parliamentary 'Nomads'

Senior Bulgarian Socialist Party functionary, Maya Manolova. Photo by BGNES

Two Members of the Parliament from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP, have logged a proposal for amendments to the Political Parties Act to eliminate "political nomadism."

Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, Maya Manolova, and MP, Yanaki Stoilov, have authored the amendments, which will bring an end to the rule that the State subsidy must follow the lawmaker if he or she decides to leave the party on whose ticket they have been elected.

Manolova said Tuesday that BSP proposes for the money to stay with the respective party or coalition, stressing this would terminate "the ugly practice of buying MPs."

Until now, renegade MPs had the right to keep the subsidy upon breaking party ranks, but they could receive it only through another parliamentary represented formation.

Pavel Shopov, from the far-right nationalist Ataka, said his group was ready to submit a similar proposal to further include a significant decrease of the subsidy's amount.

However, the restriction for MPs from dissolved parliamentary groups or for those leaving a particular group on their own decision to remain independent, without the right to join another fraction, would remain in place.

Hristo Biserov, from the liberal ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms, DPS, initially asked to strike the restriction on grounds political nomadism would stop being mass practice if the money factor was eliminated, but at the end agreed to keep it in the parliamentary code.

The much debated issue of how to redirect the State subsidies the independents have received for being elected on the ballot of a particular party, and should they be redirected, popped up as early as July 2011 when 12 of the 18 "independent" Members of the Parliament, renegades from a wide array of political parties, issued a declaration backing then Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov, and providing his minority government with a parliamentary majority in the third no-confidence vote against the cabinet of the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, GERB, party.

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