DOST LEADER MESTAN SAYS THEY WILL CHALLENGE THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTIONS AND DEMANDED A NEW VOTE

DOST party will dispute the results of the elections, the party leader Lyutvi Mestan said at a press conference on 28th of March. According to him, the elections were not fair and transparent, because of pressure exercised on their supporters and anti-constitutional actions. Mestan believes that if there was no negative campaign against DOST, the alliance would have had enough votes to enter Parliament.

In his opinion, DOST Alliance made quite a unique result for the six months since the party was registered. Mestan said that those 100,000 votes have broken the monopoly of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms in the ethnically mixed areas. He thanked all those voters who he described as very brave people because of the repression exercised on them.

"The votes gained by DOST would have been enough to enter the 44th Parliament if a deliberately planned and aggressive campaign, or not just a campaign but rather anti-constitutional and unlawful actions, were not launched against the party," Mestan said.

Lutvi Mestan cited the Penal Code in relation to those actions that he spoke about, which concerned the restriction of political rights. As regards the stopping of buses at the border, he described the actions of the United Patriots as outrage against people who came to exercise their legitimate right to vote.

(He was referring to several attempts by supporters of the nationalist United Patriots coalition to block the Bulgarian-Turkish border in the days before 26th of March and stop buses with Bulgarian immigrants, holders of Bulgarian passports, who were bussed-in to Bulgaria o vote in the early parliamentary elections.)

Mestan said he alerted the Prosecutor’s office, demanding a full investigation of what happened at the border. He said that people had been pulled at the border, they were stopped to go to vote or to return to their homeland.