Approximately 10,000 people voted more than once in the June 17 parliamentary elections, according to the data of the Civic Initiative for Free and Democratic Elections (CIFDE), its chairman Ilia Bozhinov said last Thursday.

The Central Election Commission had not authorized them to conduct checks, he said, so the survey was based only on the results from approximately 100 polling stations and 15,000 respondents.

According to Bozhinov, the electorate of the victorious National Movement Simeon II (NMSII) was unstable because it had gathered votes from all political forces and from people who did not vote in the previous elections.

According to the CIFDE poll, the average voter for former king Simeon Saxe-Coburg's NMSII formation had a high school education, was aged between 35 and 44, was jobless or poor, had a driving job or was a forester. The United Democratic Forces (UtDF) received the votes of the young, the highly educated, housewives and women on maternity leave, researchers, and private entrepreneurs. The typical vote for the Bulgarian Socialist Party-led Coalition For Bulgaria, according to CIFDE's data, was from pensioners, teachers, or people with a job in the sphere of culture.

The MBMD polling agency built a similar profile for the average Saxe-Coburg supporter. According to an exit-poll conducted by MBMD on June 17 and released last Thursday, 18 per cent of those who voted for the NMSII were aged 18 to 29, 51 per cent had high-school education, 18 per cent were unemployed, and 91 per cent were ethnic Bulgarians.

MBMD found that all age groups and social categories, both sexes, and urban and rural residents supported the NMSII. It garnered the support of 45 per cent of those who in 1997 voted for the UtDF coalition and of 28 per cent of those who supported the BSP.

The ethnic Turkish Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) garnered the support of two-thirds of Turkish voters and 15 per cent of Roma voters who participated in the elections. Only six per cent of those who voted for the MRF were members of the Bulgarian ethnic majority.

The VMRO-Gergiovden coalition won the support of city residents, the young and middle-aged. If the current situation was preserved, the coalition would make it into the 40th National Assembly, according to MBMD.