GERB Moves to Curb Separatism in New Bulgarian Parliament

The Members of the new Bulgarian Parliament will no longer be able to switch from one parliamentary group to another, or to form new parliamentary groups.

This was decided Thursday by the Parliamentary Committee crafting the working rules of the Parliament, which convened for the first time on Tuesday.

This new regulation was proposed by the GERB party. The representatives of the former three-way coalition parties, the BSP and the DPS, voted against it arguing that this measure interfered with the constitutional rights of the deputies, and that parliamentary group separatism was an issue that each party had to tackle individually.

The Statutes Committee further decided that Deputy Parliament Chairs would be dismissed from their position in case they were expelled or left their party's parliamentary group. GERB's representatives also managed to pass a new provision stipulating that the Parliament Chair, in this case their MP Tsetska Tsacheva, would be able to determine which one of her deputies would preside over the respective parliamentary session every week.

The latest major new measure adopted Thursday is the reduction of the Parliamentary Committees from 25 to 18.

Another provision proposed by the GERB party, which has not been discussed by the Committee yet, is to deprive those deputies who were absent from five Parliamentary sittings within one month, or from three consecutive sessions, of two-thirds of their monthly salaries. The work of the Statutes Committee on the new rules is still in progress.

The 40th Bulgarian Parliament was notorious for the large number of MPs who switched their parliamentary groups or started new ones. The five parliamentary groups from 2005 doubled to ten groups in June 2009.

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