Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Sergei Stanishev was re-elected to the post on October 18 2009 in a snap election he himself called, just one episode in a weekend of dramas at three of the country’s minority parties.
 
Before the BSP’s 47^th congress, critics of Stanishev – the former prime minister who led his party to defeat in Bulgaria’s 2009 European and national parliamentary elections – had called for a leadership election at the congress.
 
But up to the morning of the congress, those close to Stanishev had made much of procedural points that, they said, would make it irregular to hold a leadership election without proper notice.
 
Stanishev, who told the conference that an "objective" picture of his party’s performance in government should be presented, rather than the "distorted" one presented by Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s Government, announced that the congress would hold a leadership election.
 
On hastily-printed ballots, four names appeared: those of Stanishev, Mladen Chervenyakov, Tatyana Doncheva and Yanaki Stoilov. The other three names were among those who had been the first to call for Stanishev to step down after the election defeats.
 
But, according to official results, Stanishev got 455 out of 779 delegates’ votes.
 
The day before, another of Bulgaria’s governing parties, the Union of Democratic Forces (in office from 1997 to 2001) held its 19^th national congress.
 
While the UDF is by no means the political force it once was, and now operates as one of the co-founders of the centre-right Blue Coalition, with the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, the party led by former UDF leader Ivan Kostov, its October 17 event showed it had lost none of its traditions of bitter fighting in public.
 
Martin Dimitrov, the fifth person to lead the UDF since its 2001 parliamentary election defeat, was subjected to open hostility among some delegates.
 
Dimitrov, who sought to assure the party conference that the UDF was a party of relevance and had a future, while he hit out at continuing disunity among Bulgaria’s rightist parties, made a striking statement by publicly criticising the UDF’s decision to join the DSB in endorsing GERB candidate Yordanka Fandukova in the November 15 2009 Sofia mayoral election.
 
Dimitrov labelled the Sofia mayoral election co-operation deal an "empty agreement", but these were by no means the harshest words spoken at the UDF conference.
 
Nadezhda Mihailova, who was foreign minister in the Kostov UDF government and who led the UDF from 2002 to 2005, described today’s UDF as resembling Bulgaria’s national football team – "all stars and no team".
 
"It does not matter who will be the leader if there is no team behind them," Mihailova said.
 
UDF chief secretary Ivan Sotirov said that the Blue Coalition was "marginalising" the UDF, Bulgarian news Focus reported. The Blue Coalition was becoming a "mausoleum of commanders," Sotirov said.
 
Those in the respective pro-Dimitrov and anti-Dimitrov camps jeered each other’s speeches, Dnevnik reported. One of the anti-Dimitrov camp labelled the UDF as diseased, and Dimitrov as the disease that needed to be removed.
 
Unlike the BSP event, those in the UDF who want a change of leadership will have their chance, on November 29 when the first round of elections for UDF leader will be held.
 
In other news, the nationalist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation – which takes its name from a force in Bulgaria’s 19th struggle for liberation from the Ottoman empire – re-elected Krassimir Karakachanov as leader. Karakachanov, who has been criticised for keeping the party in its place of no special significance in Bulgaria’s political landscape, saw off a challenge by Slavcho Atanassov – the Plovdiv mayor recently involved in the controversy that ensued when he banned Czech artist David Cerny from exhibiting on municipal property – who led a group of his supporters in a walkout from the congress hall.