Trust in Bulgaria’s Parliament Hits a Low on Eve of Elections

Public trust in the Bulgarian parliament is now just 6%, according to a survey carried out days before the country heads to the polls on Oct. 27 for its seventh general election in just three years.

The poll, conducted by bTV, a Bulgarian media group, and Market Links, a market and social research company, also found that only 17% have trust in the current caretaker government.

The 6%, according to Dobromir Zhivkov, a sociologist cited by the Novinite news agency, is a record low.

A Gallup poll published on Tuesday also found that Bulgarians’ confidence in the honesty of their elections had fallen to 10% – from a high of 36% in 2006 – which is well below the EU median of 62%.

The dismal percentages appear to reflect growing dissatisfaction within the Bulgarian population with a political system that has failed to provide the country with a prolonged period of stability and seen governments come and go with alarming rapidity.

Bulgarians vote on Sunday because the general elections on June 9 – triggered by the collapse of a previous government – produced no conclusive result.

The biggest winner on that day was the GERB-SDS coalition, which got just under 24% of the vote. It was unable to strike a coalition agreement and therefore could not form a government.

Numerous attempts by runner-up parties to cobble together a government within Bulgaria’s fractious and bickering political environment also failed, damaging public faith in democratic institutions and setting the country on the road to this week’s election.

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But any hopes Bulgarians may harbor for a decisive election result could be short-lived.

The same poll found that seven parties are expected to enter parliament following Sunday’s vote, with the GERB-SDS leading the pack at 24%, some 10 percentage points more than its nearest rival. This number, like June’s, will make its chances of forming a government an uphill struggle.

This could mean that Sunday’s result might be a repeat of June’s and that the country faces yet more political instability as parties jostle to form a government.

The instability could also further enhance the popularity of Revival, a pro-Russian far-right party that placed third in the bTV poll on 13.1%. In other polls it has come second.

This report by Matthew Day is reprinted with permission from TVP Word.  See the original here.