In 2021, when the series of elections in the country began, the intrigue in Gabrovo revolved around securing a fourth mandate. Two years later, in one of the smallest electoral districts, the question now is how much more parties and coalitions will lose after the elections on April 2.
The reflections on this topic are prompted by the results from the four parliamentary votes from April 2021 to October 2022. With the exception of “Vazrazhdane,” all parties and coalitions that registered lists in Gabrovo for participation in the parliamentary vote report a decline in trust.
The most significant drop is observed for ITN. When it appeared in the elections in April 2021, Slavi Trifonov’s party received almost 10,000 votes, which dwindled to under 1,500 by October 2022. This trend is not surprising given how quickly ITN fell from sociological forecasts.
For the extraordinary parliamentary elections on April 2, Yavor Bozhanov and Dragomir Stoynev, formerly colleagues in the BSP parliamentary group, are opponents this time. Stoynev leads the BSP list while Bozhanov, who was expelled from his parliamentary group due to his position on providing military aid to Ukraine, is running for “PP – Democratic Bulgaria.”
In 2021, PP (“We Continue the Change”) did not exist, and by the fall of last year, “Bulgarian Rise” was also not part of the political race.
Will the emergence of the new left formation “The Left!” “steal” more votes from the socialists? The short answer is “most likely not.”
For April 2, the BSP appointed Dragomir Stoynev as the head of their list in Gabrovo. Stoynev is the third candidate to lead the list in the electoral district after race car driver Krum Donchev and the regional party leader Valeri Mitov. According to local socialists, he possesses the qualities and popularity to attract a larger vote. Whether this will happen remains to be seen.
Will anything change with “The Change,” which shifted local sentiments upon its emergence in November 2021, but whose support has dwindled from over 10,000 votes to below 8,000 in under a year? Their partners for April 2, “Democratic Bulgaria,” received more than 3,000 votes only once—on July 11, 2021, when they managed to secure a mandate after 12 years outside of mainstream politics, but the joy was short-lived. Immediately following the summer of 2021, “Democratic Bulgaria” began to report increasingly lower results, which ultimately cost them their hard-won mandate.
Will Yavor Bozhanov, who is being put forward as the head of the list for “We Continue the Change” in Gabrovo, compensate for the loss of trust? We shall see. He will certainly have to work hard to gain voters’ support, as a simple calculation shows that the combined votes for “We Continue the Change” and “Democratic Bulgaria” do not exceed the votes for their main opponent, GERB-SDS (based on the results of the last elections in October 2022).
In Gabrovo, GERB is not experiencing significant losses, but they have not gained from the four parliamentary elections held to date. On the contrary, their support is gradually eroding. The party led by Borissov has seen a decrease of nearly 4,000 votes since 2021. With almost 16,000 votes for GERB in April 2021, the party garnered only 12,000 votes in October 2022. This decline comes despite the full mobilization of all structures, including local authorities. In addition to fewer votes, GERB has retained only one deputy from Gabrovo, and theoretically, this situation is unlikely to change.
DPS appears to have a ceiling of support, hovering around 1,800 votes, primarily coming from three villages in Sevlievo with predominantly Turkish populations. Curiously, with this minimal support, DPS has secured a mandate twice, and there is local confidence that this will happen again. Under the vote redistribution system, this is legal, even if local voters deem it unfair.
Since “Vazrazhdane” is the only party in the area whose results continue to grow with each new vote, it will be interesting to see whether they can boast an increase in support after April 2. When they first emerged in April 2021, only 1,200 voters in the Gabrovo region supported “Vazrazhdane.” By October 2022, that number had risen to just over 4,500—enough to secure a mandate, which “Vazrazhdane” also held in the last parliament.
Gabrovo is one of the regions in the country that sends the minimum allowable number of deputies to parliament—four.
