Bulgaria's Top Cop 'Sorry' for Election Mess

Tsvetan Tsvetanov, acting Interior Minister and head of the election headquarters of center-right ruling party GERB, has offered an official apology for the total chaos at the October 23 "2 in 1" elections and the vote counting.

"This is the first time that presidential and local elections are held simultaneously. This made it difficult to organize the process. The Election Code, however, was adopted so as to provide full guarantees that there is no chance of abuse," Tsvetanov said in an interview for the 24 Hours daily, commenting on the recurring obstacles which surfaced on election day.

"I appoligize for the inconvenience to all representatives of sectional and municipal electoral commissions, but I am sure that years from now, if such a coincidence takes placel, there will not be an "n" number of political persons and participants in the elections," Bulgaria's acting Interior Minister stated.

Tsvetanov gave assurances that the situation at the runoff would be less stressful because both the presidential and the local vote implied a choice between two candidates.

When asked to account for the presence of the two GERB MPs at the headquarters of the Sofia municipal electoral commission in the Universiada Hall, he said that they had acted as "fully authorized regional coordinators representing the party during the elections on the territory of the Sofia municipality."

Tsvetanov refuted accusations of electoral manipulations and of scare tactics deployed by GERB, saying that scaremongering and attempts at vote-rigging had taken place in the Vidin and Kardzhali municipalities.

The head of GERB's election headquarters boasted that the center-right party had achieved a major breakthrough in a number of strongholds of the ethnic Turkish party Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) "despite the fear."

Asked about the repercussions of DPS leader Ahmed Dogan's official statement of support for Ivaylo Kalfin, presidential candidate of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), and rival of GERB's Rosen Plevneliev at the October 30 runoff, he said that the upcoming vote provided an unprecedented chance to choose a head of state without the intervention of "a political figure."

Tsvetanov praised independent presidential runner Meglena Kuneva's decision to not instruct her supporters about how to vote at the runoff.

In his opinion, an explicit recommendation of a preferred candidate would have signaled an underestimation of the voter and could only be expected from "parties like DPS and BSP."