GERB: Bulgaria Ruling Coalition Funds Campaign with Drug Trafficking

The parties from Bulgaria's ruling three-way coalition have raised much of the money for their election campaigns through illegal trafficking, including drugs, and contraband.

This was announced by the Chair of the opposition GERB party, Tsvetan Tsvetanov, in Kurdzhali Wednesday night.

Tzvetanov claims he had reliable information that the three-way coalition of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) and former Tsar Saxe-Coburg's party, NMSP, were providing political covers for various smuggling schemes.

"Much of the funds poured by the ruling coalition parties in this campaign was generated through the contraband carried out by the government... The state tolerates smuggling of vegetables, thus killing the Bulgarian producers, smuggles Chinese goods, drugs, and anything that can be a matter of contraband in order to avoid paying the respective duties", Tzvetanov declared as quoted by BGNES.

"You don't think that someone will pull money of their own pocket in order to by 5 000 votes, do you? Today we have no adequate counteraction to the existing contraband channels that provide murky funding for certain political circles", the GERB Chair said adding his information came from reliable civil servants who did not agree with what was going on in Bulgaria.

Tzvetanov did say that the honesty of those people would be awarded in the event of a new government configuration. He urged for a maximum mobilization of all Bulgarian voters for the two elections in June and July as the only means to combat the buying of votes.

Tzvetanov was positive that the corruption schemes of the governing parties had allowed them to poor a lot of money in the campaigns, while the maximum campaign spending by law was BGN 1 M. He said Sofia Mayor Borisov's party GERB had spent no more than BGN 250 000 on its campaign.

"If the voter turnout is as low as 20-25% this is going to threaten seriously the democracy in the country. In this scenario Bulgaria's future will be determined by vote-buying", Tzvetanov concluded.