Great work again Beagle. Some comments:
GERB (leader: Boyko Borisov, 2014: 33%, 84 MPs, 2016: 22%): The Fidesz-isation of the party continues unabated. After the loss in the Presidential, the intra-party civil war has simmered down, but from the party lists it is fairly obvious that the modernizing Western-style faction has lost.
I question how effective that fraction ever was, considering that Borisov never really cared about that, except for carrying out the orders he got from the EU.
Looking at the results, this doesn't seem to have been important. It seems that most GERB voters could not care less about who was in the lists as long as Borisov is leading the party.
I don't quite agree. The attitude in the EU is currently especially hostile to far-right parties. While they will almost certainly support the governing coalition, their reward will have to be an under the table deal rather than openly.
New Republic (leader: Radan Kanev)
A new project designed to give the disenchanted urban professionals, who were at the forefront of the 2013-14 protests against the Oresharski government, somebody to vote for after GERB+RB failed to pass any significant reforms and collaborated with the oligarchy. Despite their rather extensive platform and despite (or rather because of) their uncompromising attitude, it feels more like the leader’s ego trip than an actual attempt to govern Bulgaria. Radan Kanev, who is a rather abrasive character, is feuding with Borisov and his former RB colleagues, so the entire campaign is based on the idea that the BSP+DPS on the one hand, and GERB+RB Mk.2 on the other, are two sides of the same coin **** [/size].
**** [/size] So you don’t get the wrong impression – all other parties are also sides of that coin. It must be a rather oddly shaped coin.
If this is sincere, this would be unprecedented for the Old Right, who's main concern since 2001 has been keeping out the "Communists" beyond any other concern.
Chances of being in parliament: None. After the DPS split, their friends from the nationalist parties hurriedly passed a law limiting voting precincts for Bulgarians abroad to 35 per country (after some protests, it changed to 35 per non-EU country). If this (likely unconstitutional) limit wasn’t in place, it would have been quite possible for DOST to pass the threshold on the votes from Turkey alone. With the DPS intimidating (or worse) the DOST people in Bulgaria and with the caretaker Interior minister cracking down on DOST vote buying (but not on DPS vote buying), they will not be able to gather the needed votes from within the country.
I'll defer to your greater knowledge, but why is it unconstitutional?
Of course, if the government wanted really to crack down to DOST, they would have banned them as obviously unconstitutional.
It's rather straightforward, really - many, if not most, Bulgarians identify either as 'communist*' or as 'anticommunist' based on their family's 1944-1989 experience (and for a substantial part of the 'communist' camp - of their family's experience post-1989 too). That is not to say that there are no defections, but for many people voting either for or against the BSP - as the successor of the communist party - forms the entirety of their political identity.
* communist in the sense of belonging to the Bulgarian Communist Party
Sorry, but this doesn't really make sense. Considering that nearly every poll on the question shows that the majority of Bulgarians have a positive opinion of the Communist period, BSP should be doing a lot better than they actually do. So this can't be such an important factor. If you mean that the tribal division was only between actual communists and anti-communists (meaning people who were repressed by the regime or were actually opponents during its existence), it would again affect a relatively minor part of the Bulgarian electorate, considering that the former was never more than 15% of the population and the later was probably was smaller than that.
