Bulgaria Nationalist "Ataka" Voice Unrequited Love for Socialists

Five days ahead of the general elections in Bulgaria, the nationalist Ataka party has made an unexpected attempt to warm up relations with the ruling Socialists.

Speaking in an interview for the local Trud daily, the nationalist party leader Volen Siderov said he is ready to hold negotiations for the forging of the country's next government both with the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party and the popular opposition centre-right GERB party.

"We will not run away from talks with any Bulgarian party and I stress Bulgarian here," Siderov told the daily.

Asked whether he would sit at the negotiation table with representatives of the Socialist or GERB party, Siderov said he is willing to do it with both of them.

The nationalists have repeatedly ruled out the possibility of entering negotiations with any of the three-way ruling coalition members, which includes the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms and the centrist National Movement for Stability and Prosperity.

Just days earlier, in an exclusive interview for Novinite.com and totally in line with his pre-election campaign so far, Siderov stressed the importance of providing an alternative to the ruling coalition.

"The party with the mandate to form a government (i.e. with the greatest number of MPs - editor's note) will face a very complicated task of forming a majority. If this is GERB, then it will be up to them to realize the mandate. Because if they fail, the mandate would go back those who rule now, and we want an alternative for many reasons - failure, corruption, criticism by the EU, internal discontent," Siderov told Novinite.com.

The Socialists, however, have given a cold shoulder to the nationalists' attempt to increase their chances of entering the next government, saying this is the only party that they will never consider forming a coalition with.

"We will negotiate with any party, which has won the trust of the voters, except for one and this is the nationalist Ataka," Gerogi Bozhinov, MP runner from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, told a rally in the town of Vratsa a day earlier.

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