Bulgaria 2009

Detailed results of yesterday’s legislative election in Bulgaria, which, as I wrote yesterday, was won convincingly by the opposition centre-right GERB. Keeping with the anti-incumbent trend which has been seen in every Bulgarian election since the fall of communism, the governing Socialist-coalition took a thumping, the Socialists in particular. The BSP’s junior coalition partner, the centrist liberal NDSV party led by former King Simeon II Saxe-Coburg-Gotha fell to 2% and lost all representation. Only the Turkish MRF/DPS has held stable, since it has a solid ethnic base and maintains this base through paternalism. Here are the full results of the election, including the 31 FPTP constituencies:

GERB 39.71% winning 116 seats [90 PR, 26 FPTP] (new)
BSP 17.70% (-13.3%) winning 40 seats (-42)
MRF/DPS 14.46% (+1.66%) winning 38 seats [33 PR, 5 FPTP] (+4)
Attack 9.36% (+1.26%) winning 21 seats (nc)
Blue Coalition 6.76% (-7.34%) winning 15 seats (-22)
Order, Law and Justice 4.13% winning 10 seats (new)
Lider 3.26% winning 0 seats (new)
NDSV 3.01% winning 0 seats (-53)

turnout 60.20% (+4.4%)

The Socialists took a well-deserved thumping in the FPTP vote. It’s good payback for them introducing such an awful voting system and using unequally populated provinces as FPTP constituencies. The DPS, however, must be quite happy with some dose of FPTP since it gave them five constituency seats, including three in provinces where Turks are less than 50% of the population (and with all Turks voting DPS and Bulgarians splitting between Bulgarian parties, the DPS won).

GERB is five short of the majority, so with the extremely likely support of the Blue Coalition, GERB will form government and Boyko Borisov will be Prime Minister of Bulgaria. However, dear left-wing readers out there, don’t despair, all Bulgarian governments have proved to be failures and GERB is unlikely to be different. You’ll probably be rejoicing at the Socialist landslide in 2013!