The spotlight on Boiko Borissov’s 100 days in power has left the three parties of Bulgaria’s former ruling coalition consigned to the shadows.

Apart from brief statements from the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), formerly the majority partner in government and now the largest party in opposition – predictably, it condemned Borissov’s Government as populist or ineffectual – little has been heard from the other two erstwhile partners, Ahmed Dogan’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP).

This naturally raised the question of what had become of the three parties that ruled the country for four years and who have left the scene in a blink of an eye after Borissov struck his big blow at the July 5 elections this summer.

Crossfire
The BSP’s situation now is similar to that in which it found itself after its fall from government in early 1997 amid the economic crisis of the times and when a groundswell of anti-communist sentiment pushed the party into isolation. While the 1990s public discontent with the successor to the Bulgarian Communist Party was rooted mainly in ideological grounds, in 2009 what cost the BSP its place in government and made it an easy target for Borissov’s constant verbal attacks were the corruption scandals that marked the 2005-2009 BSP-MRF-NMSP government. 

Largely ignoring the other two parties, Borissov picked the BSP (who had the biggest share of seats in the coalition) as the party responsible for all wrongdoings in Bulgaria, and succeeded in portraying it as the source of all evil. Even though elections were more than three months ago, almost every public speech by Borissov features sideswipes against what the BSP and its leader, former prime minister Sergei Stanishev, have done or failed to do. 

The pinnacle so far of this anti-BSP line was the scandal about alleged leaks of classified information from the cabinet of Stanishev when he was still prime minister, which has resulted in Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev requesting the removal of Stanishev’s immunity as an MP from prosecution. This made Stanishev the first former prime minister to come under formal investigation just weeks after he left the post, which hardly helped Stanishev’s image. The bigger problem for him, however, remained the lack of unity within his party.

After its election defeat, the BSP, quite predictably, was caught in internal struggles, requests for Stanishev’s resignation and for a return to the socialist roots of BSP’s policy. So far Stanishev has succeeding in holding on to his post by promising to unite the party, but the increasing number of voices in the BSP blaming him for the party’s crisis suggests that he will not have an easy task hanging on in the long term.

Regrouping
The second largest opposition party, Dogan’s MRF, has virtually disappeared from the public eye after the elections. The only place where MRF members appear is Parliament. A good example was a November 3 political talk show on public broadcaster Bulgarian National Television (BNT) where the only seat that stayed vacant was that set aside for an MRF representative. Just as Dogan is known for staying out of the public eye, MRF members have started avoiding media attention.

Borissov’s picking on the BSP has also helped the MRF avoid being cited by the new ruling party GERB as partly to blame for Bulgaria being in a poor economic and social state. Recently, Borissov said in a newspaper interview that his main political enemy was not Stanishev but Dogan who, according to ultra-nationalist Ataka leader Volen Siderov (who unlike the MRF representative was on the BNT talk show), was just keeping a low profile, regrouping and waiting to hit back.   

Dethroned
Of the three former ruling parties, the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP) scored the worst election result, winning no seats in Parliament. The party ascribed its election loss to its coalition with the BSP and the MRF having taken its toll, and no talk of "we stayed in power for the sake of Bulgaria’s stability and EU accession efforts" could change that.

Saxe-Coburg resigned as party leader, which made some analysts say that the project called NMSP was about to be shut down after eight years in politics. Now the party is to elect its next leader who, besides coming up with a new identity for the party,  will have to decide how to spend the millions of leva in state subsidies that the NMSP will get in the next four years for winning more than one per cent of the vote.