The votes that Delian Peevski’s coalition received in the Gabrovo region on October 27 do not come from sections where DPS is traditionally supported. This is indicated by the results from yesterday’s voting, extracted from all the sectional protocols in the Gabrovo region.
This Sunday, ‘DPS – New Beginning’ received 1,333 votes in the Seventh Gabrovo Electoral District, while the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ garnered 1,505 votes. Given that recent voting in the region shows that the electoral ceiling for DPS is around 1,600-1,700 votes, it is curious that the combined votes for both coalitions—Peevski’s and Dogan’s—received just over a thousand votes more than those who voted for DPS before the split. Moreover, we are not discussing voter turnout here, as voting in villages with ethnic Turks in the region is always organized and disciplined, evident from the relatively consistent results reported after each election.
The expectations that Peevski would take votes from Dogan in Gabrovo did not materialize, raising the question of where the extra thousand votes for Peevski’s DPS came from if Dogan’s DPS maintained its support?
One possible explanation is that those who supported the ‘DPS – New Beginning’ list simply recognized in Peevski the politician who represents them. However, this raises the question of why voting for ‘DPS – New Beginning’ appears to be massive only in certain sections, where votes for the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ are counted on fingers.
Despite expectations, there was no clash or competition over which of the two formations would receive more votes from the electorate, and in places where votes for ‘DPS – New Beginning’ predominate, votes for the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ are either nonexistent or negligible, and vice versa.
There is one exception—Petko Slaveykov village, where the leader of the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ list, Yusein Veyselyov, resides.
This village is one of four, along with Krushevo, Gradnitsa, and Ryakhovtsi, that play a crucial role in the results for DPS in the Gabrovo region before the party split.
On October 27, Petko Slaveykov was the only village in the Gabrovo region with a predominantly ethnic Turkish population where ‘DPS – New Beginning’ intervened in the distribution of votes.
Of the voters who went to the two sections, 180 voted for the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms,’ while 136 voted for ‘DPS – New Beginning.’ Only in this village did the split in DPS evidently affect voter behavior.
In Ryakhovtsi, the established order remains—only 16 votes were cast for ‘DPS – New Beginning,’ compared to 261 for the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms.’
In Krushevo, 76 voters supported the Alliance, while only 23 voted for the New Beginning. The same pattern is observed in Gradnitsa, where the numbers are 194 votes for Dogan’s supporters against 56 for Peevski’s.
So far, it is clear that ‘DPS – New Beginning’ has not garnered its support by stealing votes from the former DPS.
However, Delian Peevski’s coalition received 95 votes from the village of Dobromirka in the municipality of Sevlievo, in contrast to only 3 votes for the Alliance. The same occurs in Dushevo, where 71 voters supported Peevski’s people, while only one voted for Ahmed Dogan’s formation. In Kormyansko, 54 voters supported Peevski’s list against 6 for the Alliance. Peevski also has a slight advantage in Sennik, where he received 31 votes against 14 for the APS list.
In fact, the narrative that the villages in the Sevlievo municipality determine the fourth mandate in Gabrovo, which lately has gone to DPS with less than two thousand votes, is no longer entirely accurate.
In the regional center Gabrovo, support for DPS was below 200 votes before October of this year. On October 27, it was 193 votes. If we take the numbers into account, it shows that those who voted for Dogan’s formation still did so. However, there are now 167 new voters who cast their votes for ‘DPS – New Beginning,’ and they all are from the town of Gabrovo. In the villages around Gabrovo, Peevski received a meager 36 votes, while the Alliance only got 9.
From the sectional protocols of the Gabrovo sections, it is evident that ‘DPS – New Beginning’ received not a single vote in almost half of the sections, and the same applies to the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms.’ Simply put, people in Gabrovo do not vote for DPS, at least not until October 27, 2024.
Against the zeros and ones in the protocols of the Gabrovo sections for the two coalitions, surprisingly, there are 51 votes for ‘DPS – New Beginning’ in the four sections of the former construction high school. There, the support for Peevski in Gabrovo is the most pronounced.
The remaining votes, as it became clear, are typically just one, two, or at most three in individual sections.
In Dryanovo, one section stands out – the seventh section in the Professional High School of Economics, where ‘DPS – New Beginning’ received 40 votes, while the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ got 20. By comparison, in the previous vote in June of this year, DPS had 16 votes in this section. This increase in support leads to a threefold increase in the total votes for both DPS in the Dryanovo municipality—from 55 votes in the June 2024 elections to 122 votes in October.
In Tryavna, they do not vote for DPS, and that has not changed. In the entire municipality, ‘DPS – New Beginning’ has five votes, while the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms’ secured 22. In Plachkovtsi, both formations received two votes each.
In the urban sections of Sevlievo, the only section where ‘DPS – New Beginning’ has a clear advantage is in the Roma neighborhood, where Peevski’s faction received 50 votes compared to only 13 for Dogan’s supporters.
From all this, it is clear that ‘DPS – New Beginning’ in the Gabrovo region did not take votes from the ‘Alliance for Rights and Freedoms,’ but rather secured its own support, nearly reaching the result that conventional DPS used to achieve in the Gabrovo region before the split. Whether this result will allow one of the two DPS to intervene in the distribution of mandates in the four-mandate electoral district remains a separate question.
