A recount in Bulgaria

It’s been a while since we looked at Bulgaria, which has recently had a quite unprecedented surfeit of elections. The most recent one, last October, was the seventh in about three and a half years. Its results were very similar to the previous one less than five months earlier, with the main difference being that the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) has split into two hostile factions, generally known after their leaders as DPS-Dogan and DPS-Peevski.

The establishment centre-right party GERB again topped the poll, with 26.4% of the vote and 69 of the 240 seats. (Official results are here.) After the usual rounds of bickering, an agreement for a coalition government was reached between GERB, the centre-left Bulgarian Socialist Party (20 seats) and the conservative-populist ITN (18 seats). With a total of 109 they were still 12 seats short of a majority, but they also made a deal for support from DPS-Dogan with its 19 seats.

So on 16 January the new government won a vote of confidence, 125-114, with Rosen Zhelyazkov as prime minister. While it contains a broad range of views, so does its opposition, which consists of the centrist-reformist PP-DB, the far-right Revival, DPS-Peevski (the more obviously corrupt half of the party, which is otherwise liberal-establishment and caters to the ethnic Turkish minority) and a new moderate far-right party, MECh.

In the meantime, there were problems with the election result. Another far-right party, Velichie (“Greatness”), had won seats in June, but in the October election recorded 3.999%, just 21 votes short of the 4% minimum required. It promptly claimed fraud and petitioned against the results, as did most of the other parties.

Last week the constitutional court, having conducted a partial recount, ordered the electoral commission to recalculate the results. According to the report, the recount covered about one-sixth of the voting precincts and found discrepancies in almost half of them. Precincts are only small, averaging around 200 voters each, so that’s a pretty alarming error rate. Another report (which Google has rendered for me out of Bulgarian) says that the discrepancies in the case of paper ballots are very small, but are more substantial in precincts with machine voting.

Even if the errors are neither systematic nor very large, they could still make a big difference if they yield the extra handful of votes that Velichie needs to get over the threshold. With 4% of the vote it would win ten seats, of which five would come from each of government and opposition; that would reduce Zhelyazkov’s margin on the vote of confidence to just one vote, 120-119. (This is a good example of why I dislike thresholds.)

Bulgaria is not a wealthy country and its democracy is of quite recent standing, so it’s no surprise that its elections would have problems. It’s good to see that the issues with this one are being addressed. But it seems that election number eight in the sequence is probably not far off, and increased instability on its Balkan flank is really not something that Europe needs just now.