Mariya Gabriel withdraws as candidate for prime minister in Bulgaria
Gabriel informed Parliament in writing of her decision to withdraw as a candidate.
Speaking to the press, Gabriel said that the coalition negotiations she had been conducting on behalf of the GERB Party with the Alliance for Change-Democratic Bulgaria (PP-DB), which has a group in the Parliament, had failed in recent days.
The country is expected to go to early parliamentary elections as a result of the GERB Party's backtracking on its attempts to form a government.
Gabriel was deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the government of Prime Minister Nikolay Denkov, who resigned on 6 March.
After Denkov's resignation, President Rumen Radev gave the task of forming the government to Gabriel, the prime ministerial candidate of the GERB Party, which has the largest group in the Parliament, on 18 March.
On 19 March, Gabriel presented President Radev with a draft cabinet of 19 ministers.
However, 11 ministerial candidates from the PP-DB, who are parties to the envisaged coalition format, withdrew their names from the list on the grounds that "Gabriel included them in the cabinet without asking them".
In the following period, GERB's efforts to form a government did not yield any results after the parties failed to reach an agreement as a result of the closed-door consultations between the parties.
Constitutional process
According to the constitutional procedure, President Rumen Radev must give the second largest group in parliament and then the third political force a chance to form a government before setting a new date for early elections.
Radev is expected to give the task of forming the second cabinet to PP-DB.
GERB leader Boyko Borisov stated that they will not support any other cabinet draft in the current parliamentary format. Borisov stated that his party prefers to go to early elections.
Delyan Peevski, Co-Chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (HÖH) Party, which supports the Nikolay Denkov Government, in which GERB and PP-DB are coalition partners, from outside and whose members are mostly Turks and Muslims, announced that his party also wants early elections. Peevski also stated that they would not support another cabinet that could be formed in the current parliament.
If there are no fundamental changes in the political arena in the country, new early elections are expected to be held after the European Parliament elections on 9 June.
