ITN's chance to govern is only if it gets along with the big parties and the strategic players in the parliament. Their conversations with independent MPs when they have few mandates behind them is an unsuccessful approach - you cannot make bread from crumbs.
This is what he told "Focus“ the chairman of the Bulgarian Association for Political Sciences Prof. Rumyana Kolarova.
According to her, the very approach of the negotiations that started the ITN was wrong, and not only in terms of topics, but also with interlocutors and format – such negotiations are not conducted in public, it is proper to make public only the starting positions of each of the parties. When talking about a mandate to govern, you should talk to parties, and you shouldn't talk to individual MPs, she also pointed out. "The search for some kind of communication with already disbanded parties and parliamentary groups rather suggests that the ITNs are to some extent looking or feeling the ground in two directions: First, whether they can attract that party to them, and secondly, whether they can against the background of this party to somehow seem bigger and more significant.“
Prof. Rumiana Kolarova expressed her firm opinion that in this parliament, after the failed attempt of GERB, there is no way to form a government. The question, according to her, is how each of the parties represented in the parliament get out of the awkward situation and who will lose the least.
"Anyone who wants to govern Bulgaria must be ready to form a coalition, and as broad a coalition as possible,” noted the expert and added that when a party does not have the ability to form a coalition and maintain it, then it loses power under the current structure of the party system of parliamentary representation. "It would be very nice if the ITN found the right approach, with which it would be possible to structure some kind of dialogue for the future, to outline the parameters of a possible coalition in the next parliament.“
One of the main mistakes that parties make, according to her, is that each party, when it receives the mandate, is ready to form a government, and then, when it is invited for talks to support the formation of a government, it behaves absolutely destructively and categorically rejects the proposed by the mandate holder and the possibility of forming a cabinet. The three big topics that are fundamental to the formation of a wider coalition are: First, how in principle the parties will interact with each other, second, what are the priorities that the parties will step on, and the third big question is how to structures the cabinet – how it should be organized and which people should enter it.
According to Prof. Kolarova, ITN is currently in a fairly favorable position compared to the other parties, but at the same time, for them, the realization of the third mandate is a test that cannot bring them profit, but the important thing is that they collect minimal losses within this parliament.