Tomorrow Parliament will vote on Mariya Gabriel's withdrawal of candidacy for Prime Minister

The Parliament will hold an extraordinary sitting on March 26 to vote on the withdrawal of Mariya Gabriel from the candidacy for Prime Minister. This is clear from an order issued by the President of the National Assembly Rosen Zhelyazkov.

The sitting is scheduled to start at 10:00 and the item on the agenda is the only one.

Earlier today, March 25, Mariya Gabriel withdrew her declared fulfilment of the exploratory mandate to form a government. She submitted an application to the Speaker of Parliament and the parliamentary group of GERB-UDF, this morning at 9:09.

The document also states that Gabriel will not participate in the parliamentary procedure for the election of the Prime Minister and will not propose the structure and complement of the Council of Ministers.

In her application, Gabriel pointed out that “the agreed rotation model for the exercise of executive power in the mandate of the 49th National Assembly, implied a rotation between the person exercising the powers of prime minister with that of deputy prime minister and vice versa, in a predictable and consensual procedure. The balance of political responsibility, according to the objective coalition weight of the entities forming the majority in the 49th National Assembly, was a shared understanding during the negotiations on the priorities of joint governance and the mechanism of decision-making."

Mariya Gabriel also stresses that "the coordinated refusal and unwillingness to participate in the Gabriel-Denkov cabinet of 11 ministers from the Denkov-Gabriel cabinet, who submitted form/blank applications to that effect and the lack of agreement during the subsequent negotiations, makes the procedure for electing a prime minister and the composition of the government meaningless. Thus, in practice, the started constitutional procedure cannot be completed successfully".

Mariya Gabriel withdraws her candidacy for Prime Minister

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At a news conference on Sunday, March 24, GERB-UDF's Prime Minister-designate, Maryia Gabriel, announced that she would withdraw her candidacy for Prime Minister and that her party is not going to participate in negotiations on the formation of a government when the President hands a mandate to the second largest group in Parliament, “We Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria”.

In a televised statement on the Bulgarian National Television later on Sunday, outgoing Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov called on GERB leadership to sign an agreement with WCC-DB and form a government with Mariya Gabriel as Prime Minister and without any changes of the ministers from the Denkov cabinet.

After long talks between the power sharing partners GERB-UDF and WCC-DB, on March 19, Gabriel went to President Radev with a ready line-up for a cabinet. “We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria”, at a special press conference later on that day, distanced themselves from the proposed cabinet line-up and said that the proposed ministers from their party had not agreed to be ministers