Coalition around Bulgaria's Ethnic Turkish Dissenter Tackles Local Voters

Supporters of Kasim Dal, a former key figure in the ethnic Turkish DPS party, and the United People's Party of MP, Maria Kapon, announced they will have a joint ballot at the upcoming fall elections.

The independent Members of the Parliament - Kapon and Dal - declared this will be a long-term partnership having among its goals to propose a new model for governing the country.

The new coalition intends to have candidates in all municipalities at the local elections on October 23rd.

At the beginning of the year, Dal resigned as vice-chair of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, DPS, after which he was formally expelled from the party for asking the ousting if its leader and long-time friend, Ahmed Dogan.

Through the 1980s Bulgaria's communist leadership staged a shameful campaign of repression against the country's ethnic Turkish minority, known as the "Revival Process." It led to the forceful renaming of close to a million Turkish-Bulgarians with Slavic names, and to the dislocation of some 350 000 of them to Turkey.

The Movement for Rights and Freedoms, one of the first opposition parties in Bulgaria, after the fall of the communist regime fell was founded by ethnic Turkish people, among whom Dogan and Dal, in order to safeguard the human rights of citizens. Since then, its electorate has been overwhelmingly from among the country's ethnic Turkish minority.

In February 2008, Maria Kapon was appointed president of the fledgling United People's Party receiving the votes of 458 participants in the constituent congress of the new formation.

Kapon says her party is neither left nor right but its main purpose иs to work for the well-being of Bulgarian people.

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