Outraged Bulgarians Blockade Shipka Mountain Pass

Politics » DOMESTIC | June 22, 2013, Saturday // 13:10
Outraged Bulgarians Blockade Shipka Mountain Pass: Outraged Bulgarians Blockade Shipka Mountain Pass The blockade staged by protesting Bulgarians at the Shipka mountain pass has been lifted and the road is now open for traffic. File photo

Protesting Bulgarians from the central city of Gabrovo and the town of Tryavna staged a blockade Saturday at the Shipka mountain pass in the Stara Planina range.

The protest on one of the main roads, connecting northern and southern Bulgaria trough the range, started at 10 am with patriotic songs.

Over 50 people gathered despite the scorching heat, and blockaded the road for 15 minutes at the time, letting vehicles pass every quarter hour.

The drivers waited patiently.

The protesters signed a petition for amending the election code, resignation of the government, and of the members of the Commission for Competition Protection.

"We want to show our outrage and be noticed because when we protest outside municipal administrations people just pass by and journalists ignore us. We want people from other places to see that we support their rallies and that this is a national protest," one of the organizers said.

The Gabrovo Regional Governor, Nikolay Grigorov, was there as well and talked to the demonstrators.

The rally lasted for one hour, alternating patriotic songs with shouts for the resignation of the government.

The pass is now reopened and traffic there is back to normal.

The rally was held on the backdrop of mass protests in the capital Sofia where the leadership of the Party of European Socialists, PES, is holding a sitting.

The PES leadership is in the country at a time their Bulgarian leader, Sergey Stanishev, is facing growing discontent from his own country people and the Bulgarian Socialist Party, BSP, which he leads as well.

Bulgarian citizens are staging mass protest rallies for the 8th day in a row. They were sparked by the outrageous decision of the government and the Parliament to appoint controversial media mogul and lawmaker Delyan Peevski as Chair of the State Agency for National Security (DANS) with Stanishev seen as one of the masterminds behind the plan.

Demonstrators are demanding the resignation of the government of Prime Minister, Plamen Oresharski, elected on the mandate of the Socialist Party.

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Tags: DPS, BSP, demonstrators, rally, protest, Victor Ponta, Movement for Rights and Freedoms, party, ethnic Turkish, Bulgarian Socialist Party, protests, DANS, State Agency for National Security, Delyan Peevski, Plamen Oresharski, protesters, Sergey Stanishev, sofia, Brussels, Party of European Socialists, PES, Occupy NDK, NDK, Stara Planina, mountain pass, Shipka, blockade, Tryavna, Gabrovo, Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, mass

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