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Georgi Kiryakov in front of FACTS: Kalin Stoyanov was acceptable to the Ministry of Internal Affairs system, but there w

All parties start with low public trust before the elections, because the trend of denying people their right to vote continues, says the political scientist

Aug 26, 2024 13:37 164

Georgi Kiryakov in front of FACTS: Kalin Stoyanov was acceptable to the Ministry of Internal Affairs system, but there w - 1

The head of state Rumen Radev received “Dondukov“ 2 candidates for acting Prime Minister, Dimitar Glavchev, who presented him with the composition of the new acting cabinet. After Dimitar Glavchev proposed that the place of Kalin Stoyanov as interior minister be taken over by Atanas Ilkov, Rumen Radev said that he would sign a decree for the "Glavchev" cabinet. 2, and the early elections to be held on October 27. What to expect in the elections… Political scientist Georgi Kiryakov spoke to FAKTI.

- Mr. Kiryakov, is Bulgaria breathing more easily now that Kalin Stoyanov will no longer be interior minister?
- Look, there is no particular difference whether the minister's name is Kalin Stoyanov or Stoyan Kalinov, since behind this minister are the same interests that were behind the previous one. As far as we can see from the development of the political situation and the comments of the main political players, this is the result of this casting. This is the first comment. The second has to do with the fact that there continues to be an extremely undemocratic trend for interior ministers to appoint police officers. Civilians should be appointed as Ministers of the Interior, although in Bulgaria this may have happened only once. Why should civilians be appointed… Because the Ministry of Internal Affairs is a power structure over which there must be civil control. The only way to implement such control is for it to be by a civilian through civil society. If we have police officers for the Minister of the Interior, the probability that his way of thinking is not civil is very high. The probability that he imagines the governance of a country as undemocratic is also very high. This is the comment I can make in relation to the appointment of yet another police officer as Minister of the Interior. It is not by chance that it is said that there is a political and professional leadership in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. There must be a civilian in the political leadership, and there is no longer a problem for the professional leadership to have policemen.

- But at the expense of this, we saw that the policemen liked the minister, because Kalin Stoyanov was dialogical - as a person from the system…
- Yes, Kalin Stoyanov was acceptable for the system inside the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but there was no dialogue with the citizens, who are the employer of this system.

- Was this the great weakness of Kalin Stoyanov, that there was no dialogue with the citizens…
- One of the weaknesses is this, and another is that it did not comply in any way with parliamentary control, to which all ministries are subject. Statements like “… I will not allow politicians to interfere in the work of the Ministry of the Interior” means that “… "I will not allow voters to interfere in the work of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, I will feudalize it to the point that there is no information about what is happening inside." This is also one of the possible comments about his work and the interpretation of these actions of his.

- Why Kalin Stoyanov became uncomfortable. We saw him as the interior minister in the “assembly”, and now…
- As far as we follow the appointments in the cabinet of the “assembly”, he was proposed by Maria Gabriel in her capacity as an agreed rotating prime minister.

This means that the probability that Kalin Stoyanov was suggested to her by Boyko Borisov and informally by Delyan Peevski is very high.

I say probably because I have no evidence of such a relationship. But the doubts are that he is part of party-political agreements that are detrimental to democracy and society. In principle, the formation of a cabinet should not be organized on the basis of an agreement on the distribution of power resources. First, programs should be drawn up, and then ministers should be discussed. In Bulgaria it is always the opposite, because we see the first distribution of posts.

- The parties first agree on who will take how many ministries…
- Yes, no matter what the formula is, they allocate who will get what share and then talk, if at all, because it rarely happened, how it will be managed, according to what program, what goals will be set, etc. .

- The elections will be held on October 27. What condition are the parties in, or will the same thing that we saw in the previous ones be repeated, but with the difference in DPS, where the tension and division are great?
- All parties start with low public legitimacy, low public trust, because the trend of denying people their right to vote continues. That is, sociology at this stage shows that even fewer voters will go to the polls on October 27. If we look at the individual parties, none of them are in good shape. GERB-SDS lost almost 100,000 votes in the last elections and there are no particular prospects of getting them back, if they are not trying through the Ministry of Internal Affairs to literally gain some kind of electoral advantage. With PP-DB, the political tone is not good either, because they lost half of their votes, compared to the peak of their popularity, and there is no prospect of regaining a huge part of them, and maybe even a small part. PP-DB have no particularly interesting pre-election messages apart from our well-known “fight against corruption” and “fighting against the influence of certain political persons“.

- And will we hear again the stereotypical “entering the Eurozone“ and Schengen?
- This is a common priority of one of the parties, including GERB-SDS, so there will not be a battle there, but this battle will be on another field, and it does not appear to benefit either of them. With DPS it is clear. The positional war that is being waged within the party itself, because there is no technological time, will most likely make the DPS appear in the elections with a party that carries the ideas. So they get some sort of registration, and Delyan Peevski also doesn't have the technological time to make a party. There is simply a technological process that is unlikely to be completed within two months. So, with him, too, we will most likely see some form of coalition between parties, to be called, for example, “New Beginning” as expected. This will lead to a situation in which neither the public will be satisfied with another early parliamentary election, nor the parties will be satisfied with the result, because the public will clearly show that it has no particular desire to participate in another party experiment.