Head of Controversial Bulgarian Conservatives Reelected

Politics » DOMESTIC | February 6, 2011, Sunday // 15:15
Bulgaria: Head of Controversial Bulgarian Conservatives Reelected Semov (left) and Yanev (right) have been reelected as RZS leaders. Photo by BGNES

Yane Yanev, chair of the controversial Bulgarian conservative Order, Law and Justice (RZS) party has been reelected by his party co-members.

On Sunday, RZS held a closed sitting of its governing board supposed to select a new leadership council, following Yanev's official resignation on Friday. He has recently complained that he and his family and relatives have been systematically harassed because of their criticism against Prime Minister Boyko Borisov and Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov.

Yanev's deputy, Atanas Semov, who resigned together with him on Friday has also been reelected.

In the past year, the RZS party has been extremely vocal in criticizing the ruling center-right party GERB and the Borisov Cabinet pulling out to the public a number of documents allegedly exposing corruption of key ministers and MPs. Other than the "media noise" such moves have led little effect in the sense that they have not caused any ruling party representative to step down.

The RZS party is considered to be close to Aleksei Petrov, a former secret agent of the State National Security Agency, who was arrested in February 2010 in "Operation Octopus" on organized crime charges, most of which were subsequently dropped.

The RZS party, simultaneously with the Galeria weekly (believed to be the mouthpiece of Aleksei Petrov) was the source of several tapes of discrediting conversations between senior Bulgarian government officials that caused "Tapegate", a scandal that shook the Borisov Cabinet in January 2011 but without causing any resignations.

In the 2009 elections, RZS got 10 MPs in Parliament, just enough to form a parliamentary group. However, later, on several occasions, some of the MPs deserted the party making all ten of them technically "independents."

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Tags: Yane Yanev, RZS, reelected, conservative, RZS, Boyko Borisov, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, Alexey Petrov

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