SOFIA: As Bulgaria prepares to vote in its first elections for the European Parliament on Sunday, the campaign is finishing with rallies and pop and rock concerts to try to increase voter turnout, which is currently predicted to be about a third of the electorate.
The campaign has been eclipsed by the country's biggest corruption scandal to date and dominated by domestic themes.

Fallout from the scandal has already eroded support for the front-running Bulgarian Socialist Party - the successor to the Bulgarian Communist Party - which is also the senior partner in the three-way governing coalition.
"In this situation, it's very hard to break through the media with the political ideas of the candidates," said Ivelin Nikolov, the vice president of the Socialist party, who is managing the campaign.

The scandal centers on Rumen Ovcharov, the Socialist economy and energy minister. The director of the National Investigative Service publicly accused him this month of interfering in a high-level corruption investigation to protect a friend.

"People are truly disappointed by the political class," said Boyko Borisov, the mayor of Sofia, whose new center-right party, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, is expected to finish a close second.
Borisov said that the corruption case showed that Bulgaria was accepted into the EU only out of sympathy and that membership should have been delayed until the country could truly meet the criteria.

"People expected that the EU would have much more serious control over Bulgaria," Borisov said. "Unfortunately they have seen that things have not gotten better, they have gotten even worse."
The European Commission is to report June 27 on Bulgaria's progress toward achieving the benchmarks agreed to last year in six areas including judicial reform and fighting corruption and organized crime.
According to Kancho Stoychev of BBSS Gallup International in Sofia, a polling and research company, "If the Socialists lose - and coming in second is losing - the political pressure inside the party will be very strong and strengthen the internal opposition" against Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev.

Earlier in the campaign, the Bulgarian media publicized a proposal to place five Bulgarian nurses facing death sentences in Libya on the party lists for the 18 seats at stake to increase pressure on the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, to grant clemency.
But the Bulgarian Parliament refused to grant an exception to the requirement that candidates must have lived in Bulgaria or the EU for the past 16 months.

Another requirement, that voters must have lived in the EU for three of the last six months, was seen as a blow against the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the ethnic Turkish party and smallest partner in the ruling coalition.
According to the Central Electoral Commission, the EU residency requirement led to the removal of 233,685 voters from the lists. Of that group, 185,662 were in Turkey, mostly ethnic Turks who fled the country in 1989 and often return during elections to vote for the Movement for Rights and Freedoms.

By Matthew Brunwasser
Published: May 17, 2007
http://www.iht.com/