Under the Election of Members of the European Parliament from the Republic of Bulgaria Act, the elections are held according to a proportional representation system with preferential voting for national ballots of political parties, coalitions and independent candidates, the country’s territory being one multi-member constituency. The law provides for a possibility to reorder the party ballots. Each voter is entitled to a preferential vote for one candidate regardless of the place assigned to him/her on the ballot by the party leaders. Under the law, a candidate who gets at least 15 per cent approval (preference) from the voters moves up the ballot, irrespective of the original order determined by the respective party leadership.
Fourteen parties, coalitions and independent candidate nomination committees have been registered for the 7 June European elections at the Central Election Commission for European Parliament. Pollsters predict that Bulgaria’s new MEPs will represent the same political forces as their predecessors: the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) political party, Coalition for Bulgaria, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and the Ataka political party.
Voter turnout in the European elections in Bulgaria is not likely to vary widely from the 34 per cent forecast for the EU as a whole. Bulgarian voters are expected to show a heightened interest in the 2009 European Parliament elections compared to the first elections in 2007, when just 29.22 per cent of Bulgarians went to the polls.
For several reasons, voter turnout is expected to be higher this time. In the first place, unlike the first voting, which was for complementary elections, the 2009 voting will be for the first regular European elections in which Bulgarian voters can participate. Next, Bulgarians now feel far more European citizens than in 2007 and are starting to realise the significance of their vote for the future of a United Europe. Still, sceptics note that the turnout may nevertheless remain low, due to insufficient information about the work of the EU institutions in Bulgaria, about the issues discussed there and how far they are important for each Bulgarian citizen.
Bulgarian nationals abroad are also entitled to vote for members of the European Parliament. Fifty-two polling stations have been established at the diplomatic and consular missions of the Republic of Bulgaria in 30 countries. Bulgarian citizens, who are eligible voters and who have a permanent and current address within the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria or a residence address in another Member State of the European Union for at least 60 days of the last three months before 7 June 2009, may exercise their voting rights there.
An important feature of the European elections in Bulgaria is that they will be followed by national parliamentary elections in less than a month’s time, and there the stakes of the principal political forces are much higher. Some analysts describe the European elections as a “dress rehearsal” for the real race for the national parliament, which will finish in early July 2009. Therefore, the political parties are doing their utmost to mobilise the largest possible part of their electorate, so as to gain momentum at the European elections, and this will inevitably raise voter participation.
National and European messages in the campaigns intermingle, which is nothing new because Bulgarian voters are used to making their European choice on the basis of the candidates’ positions on domestic issues. Thus, despite the gradual cultivation of a sense of European identity in Bulgarian citizens, Bulgarians have arguably not yet started to perceive the problems of United Europe as their own, and continue to vote driven by domestic motives.
Curiously, the European Parliament elections will be the first virtual elections in Bulgaria. The political forces will clash above all in the social networks, and above all on the Internet sites and blogs, rather than in the country’s streets and squares. A group of active Internet users is organised around each political force, and they take care of the good showing of their candidates. By this campaign stratagem, parties seek to attract apolitical voters and to win over the “undecideds” who will be of decisive importance.
Yet another novelty has been introduced in Bulgaria for the 2009 election campaign: the possibility to vote electronically. The Central Election Commission said that electronic voting will be carried out on an experimental basis at the European elections in 50 voting sections countrywide, which have not yet been specified.
Yordan Dimitrov is Junior Expert at the Information,
Public Relations and European Communication Directorate,
Bulgarian Ministry for Foreign Affairs.
