Public trust in the Bulgarian parliament is now just 6%, according to a survey carried out days before the country heads to the polls on Oct. 27 for its seventh general election in just three years.
The poll, conducted by bTV, a Bulgarian media group, and Market Links, a market and social research company, also found that only 17% have trust in the current caretaker government.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
The 6%, according to Dobromir Zhivkov, a sociologist cited by the Novinite news agency, is a record low.
A Gallup poll published on Tuesday also found that Bulgarians’ confidence in the honesty of their elections had fallen to 10% – from a high of 36% in 2006 – which is well below the EU median of 62%.
The dismal percentages appear to reflect growing dissatisfaction within the Bulgarian population with a political system that has failed to provide the country with a prolonged period of stability and seen governments come and go with alarming rapidity.
Bulgarians vote on Sunday because the general elections on June 9 – triggered by the collapse of a previous government – produced no conclusive result.
The biggest winner on that day was the GERB-SDS coalition, which got just under 24% of the vote. It was unable to strike a coalition agreement and therefore could not form a government.
Numerous attempts by runner-up parties to cobble together a government within Bulgaria’s fractious and bickering political environment also failed, damaging public faith in democratic institutions and setting the country on the road to this week’s election.
Georgia Votes in Crucial Test for Democracy, EU Ambitions
But any hopes Bulgarians may harbor for a decisive election result could be short-lived.
The same poll found that seven parties are expected to enter parliament following Sunday’s vote, with the GERB-SDS leading the pack at 24%, some 10 percentage points more than its nearest rival. This number, like June’s, will make its chances of forming a government an uphill struggle.
This could mean that Sunday’s result might be a repeat of June’s and that the country faces yet more political instability as parties jostle to form a government.
The instability could also further enhance the popularity of Revival, a pro-Russian far-right party that placed third in the bTV poll on 13.1%. In other polls it has come second.
This report by Matthew Day is reprinted with permission from TVP Word. See the original here.
You can also highlight the text and press Ctrl + Enter
