Predicting that four million of Bulgaria’s 6.8 million eligible voters will go to the polls on July 5 2009, Sova Harris agency said that 33.7 per cent would vote for Boiko Borissov’s party the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria.
 
Borissov’s party, known by its Bulgarian abbreviation as GERB, continued to hold the lead shown in various recent polls, with Sova Harris saying that Sergei Stanishev’s Bulgarian Socialist Party-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria would get 24.6 per cent.
 
Ahmed Dogan’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), the party supported mainly by Bulgarians of Turkish ethnicity, was set for 12 per cent, Volen Siderov’s ultra-nationalist Ataka 9.2 per cent, the centre-right Blue Coalition seven per cent, right-wing LIDER five per cent, Yane Yanev’s Order Law and Justice (OLJ) 4.5 per cent and Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP) 2.8 per cent.
 
Sova Harris’s Vassil Tonchev said in mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa that, based on these figures, it would be possible for a right-wing coalition government to be formed, one that would hold a slim majority in Bulgaria’s 240-seat unicameral Parliament.
 
With elections just a few days away, speculation about possible permutations for a coalition is the pursuit de jour for Bulgaria’s talking heads, although no consensus is emerging beyond that forming a government is likely to prove a difficult task.
 
Beside Tonchev’s prediction of a GERB-Blue Coalition-led cabinet, others such as Afis agency’s Yurii Aslanov was quoted by daily Standart as conveying what all parties have said, that the only permutation that should be excluded is a cabinet including Ataka.
 
Kolyo Kolev from Mediana says that GERB needed at least three allies and that GERB and the Blue Coalition’s Ivan Kostov would not command a majority in Parliament. Even if Saxe-Coburg’s NMSP joined them, they would not have 121 seats.
 
On June 26, agency MBMD said that GERB would get from 28 to 32 per cent, the Coalition for Bulgaria from 17 to 22 per cent, the MRF nine to 12 per cent, Ataka from eight to 10 per cent, the Blue Coalition seven to eight per cent, and the NMSP, OLJ and LIDER about four to five per cent each.