BULGARIAN LAWMAKERS POSTPONED THE DECISION REGARDING THE RESULTS OF THE REFERENDUM

On 11th of January, days before the Parliament is dissolved, the Bulgarian lawmakers held the first session after the recess.

As part of the tradition, all parliamentary groups made political statements for the new session.

The MP’s have noted this will be the shortest session of the National Assembly, which will be dissolved in several days when the President-elect Roumen Radev assumes office.

In their statements, the MP’s noted the aims of the separate political formations during the forthcoming pre-election campaign and that a decision needed to be made regarding the results of the national referendum held on 6th of November 2016. Later, however, at the request of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the MP’s decided to postpone the decision related to the referendum.

99 MPs voted in favor of postponing the decision. All the members of the main ruling party, the centre-right GERB and some MP’s from Bulgarian Democratic Centre were against the postponing, BNT reporter Nadezhda Vassileva told BNT.

Next week, GERB will again table a draft decision related to the results from the questions from the referendum, which were about electing MPs through a majority system with absolute majority in two rounds; the introduction of compulsory voting at elections and referendums; the annual state subsidy allocated for financing of the political parties and coalitions to be BGN 1 for each real vote received at the last general elections.