Mayor of Bulgaria Sea Capital Varna Secures Fourth Term - Exit Polls

The citizens of Varna, the largest city and seaside resort on the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast, have given the thumbs up for their incumbent mayor for the fourth time, according to exit polls.

Kiril Yordanov, who was endorsed by the country's ruling centrist-right GERB party, garnered 59% of the votes.

He managed to defeat Vesselin Mareshki, a hyper ambitious and controversial Bulgarian businessman, founder and owner of a large low-cost drug store chain. Mareshki was nominated by an initiative committee and was supported by 41% of the votes in the second round.

Yordanov stepped into his first term as mayor of the biggest coastal town in Bulgaria in 1999. During the previous local elections in 2007, he won the race for mayor in the first round after garnering the support of 53.42% of the voters at a turnout of 45.02%.

Prior to the second round Yordanov kept a low profile and persistently refused to join pre-election debates with his rival Veselin Mareshki.

"The pre-election generosity of my rival [Vesselin Mareshki] is in a league of its own, the stuff of folklore," Yordanov said in one of his rare comments.

In between the two rounds Mareshki received the much coveted support of the previously ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party and the National Movement for Stability and Prosperity (NMSP), the political party of Bulgaria's former tsar and former prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg.

During the local elections two years ago, when Mareshki also ran for mayor of Varna, his name was implicated in vote buying. Back then he handed out banknotes of BGN 100 to teachers who had walked off the job in protest against small wages. The businessman had promised them more money in case he become elected, which he failed to do. Police searched his offices back then, but now reports say he is handing out – again – bribes to his clients and potential voters as high as BGN 150.

Mareshki has denied all the allegations. He has repeatedly declared that he is ready to rule Varna and has promised to boost the investors' confidence in the city.

He has accused the incumbent mayor of being arrogant, with no good manners and "slightly insane".

Varna is the third-largest city in Bulgaria after Sofia and Plovdiv, with a population of 334,870 inhabitants according to Census 2011.

Commonly referred to as the marine (or summer) capital of Bulgaria, Varna is a major tourist destination, business and university centre and a seaport.

Being one of Bulgaria's richest and biggest municipalities, Varna resembled a battlefield during the stormy pre-election campaigns.

A total of thirty-seven parties, coalitions and initiative committees took part in the first round of the mayoral elections in Varna.

Surprisingly the first round of the elections in the coastal municipality was marred by a relatively low voters' turnout - 33%. In every other municipality in the district of Varna, the local and presidential elections managed to quicken the pulse of more voters.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!