Socialists: President Impeachment Means New Form of Govt for Bulgaria

The suggestions by the rightist parties to impeach Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov are serious hints at changing the country's form of government.

This is the formal position of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which was chaired by Parvanov in 1997-2002, before he got elected President, made public Tuesday by the Executive Bureau of the party.

“Part of the right-wing wants to change the form of government and the functioning of the political system,” the Bureau member Boyko Velikov said.

The BSP leader and ex-PM Sergey Stanishev said that “everything was done in favor of one person”, referring to his successor Boyko Borisov.

On Monday, the rightist party Democrats for Strong Bulgaria of Ivan Kostov demanded that Parvanov be impeached if evidence was found that he was involved in violations by Bulgarian companies in the UN Oil for Food program for Iraq in the late 1990s.

At the same time, the nationalist Ataka party has demanded that Parvanov be impeached over failing to inform the Parliament of all of his actions, as stipulated by Article 14 of the Constitution.

Velikov has said that the claims about Parvanov’s involvement with the Oil for Food program were old ones, and totally unfounded. In his words, the rhetoric about the President’s impeachment is more of an extension of the “lustration” topic – i.e. removing from state posts all persons involved with the former State Security – the intelligence and secret police of the communist regime. Parvanov is known to have been a State Security collaborator known as Agent Gotse.

Velikov has said the whole impeachment affair was a test to the robustness and maturity of the Bulgarian state institutions, especially the Parliament.