A week before the parliamentary elections, the Ministry of Internal Affairs demonstrated high activity, consisting of actions against vote buyers. The question is whether it reaches the upper floors of the organizers of election trade. In the studio of “This morning“ Polina Paunova, journalist, Tihomir Bezlov, Center for the Study of Democracy, Ilhan Henday, journalist, were guests on the topic.
„The big problem is that we as citizens do not believe what the institutions tell us – starting with the Ministry of the Interior, the prosecutor's office and the court. We are in a dire publicity crisis. Meanwhile, civil organizations, informal groups pull out lists with strange nicknames inside them, I'm talking about a list of “bg elves”, in which people like Pampersa, Kuchkarya, Prucha and all other exotics are allegedly buying votes in favor of DPS-Novo beginning. There are other named parties in this list, there are fewer of them, Paunova said. He added that no one deals with these people.
Ilhan Henday believes that the idea of the list is for pre-election purposes, not to detain people. “All past elections have shown that there is vote buying, they have shown that the Ministry of Internal Affairs works with heart and soul and as much as the law allows. We talk to each other, but you have not interviewed a living major vote trader. "The system is designed perfectly," he said. According to him, the allegations of vote-buying lead to DPS-New Beginning because Kiril Petkov, who wanted to have a minister to conduct the elections, made the most noise.
Aldai believes that the current interior minister is “breaking into work”, but there are also gaps. He pointed out that in the Eastern Rhodopes votes are being bought for firewood. Hendaye says that a logging boss is a monopolist in the region and is the chairman of the municipal DPS, loyal to Ahmed Dogan, and after a tip-off, the Ministry of Internal Affairs stepped in and checked him.
Tikhomir Bezlov said that in these elections there was as much talk about buying votes as there had not been in a while. According to him, the low level of sellers are robbed, but there is no case in which people who buy directly for the parties are caught. After the last few votes, the sentences for buying votes are between 2-5% of those detained, and they are mostly suspended. In these elections, the price for a vote rose to BGN 100-150. The risk sections are around 1000 and after the elections you can check what the vote was there.
Guests in the studio united around everyone buying votes.