Bulgaria's Commission for Protection against Discrimination (CPD) has found Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov, who is the leader of the biggest party in opposition the Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria (abbreviated as GERB in Bulgarian), guilty of discrimination and asked him to apologise to the ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) for his words that the BSP was a party with no morality.
Borissov made the statement in May 2008 after Georgi Andreev, mayor of Vetrino municipality in the Black Sea region of Bourgas, elected on the GERB ticket in 2007, switched sides and joined the BSP.
Borissov saw Andreev's BSP membership as a form of attack against GERB, which recent polls show to have the highest approval ratings in Bulgaria ahead of next year's Parliament elections, with BSP coming second.
Based on Borissov comment, the BSP party organisation in Bourgas filed a claim with the CPD, which it won. Now Borissov has to apologise for his comment or risk being fined up to 10 000 leva.
His reaction to the CPD ruling, however, as reported by Bulgarian news agency Focus, was that he had no intention of apologising. "I will not apologise to the communists," he said. BSP is the direct successor of the former Bulgarian Communist Party, which ruled the country from 1947 till 1989.
"I am glad that I am discriminating these people who have caused irreversible damage to thousands of Bulgarians, including to my family, when they executed my grandfather," he said.
"There is no doubt that communists have no morality, otherwise they would not have formed a ruling coalition with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms and the party of the former Bulgarian monarch Simeon Saxe-Coburg.
"If I had caused them a moral insult, then they had killed thousands of people some of whom have disappeared without trace. Not only I am not going to apologise but I feel proud because of my grandfather's memory and the one of thousands of people who have died in the fight against communists. I am proud that these people [BSP] have felt a moment of discrimination because we have felt that way through our entire life," Borissov said.
The CPD gave Borissov 15 days to publish an apology in Bulgaria media with national coverage. He can appeal the ruling in 14 days.