Lyutvi Mestan, ousted from the post of chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), a scandal that is still picking up speed in the country, gave a press conference to explain what had happened, but only made things even more incomprehensible. He declared he would stay in politics, probably in its right-wing “national liberal spectrum”. There is one centrist liberal formation in the Borissov cabinet already, a formation that lays claim to representing the Muslim voters – the Freedom and Dignity party which is part of the right-wing Reformist Bloc.

If Mestan’s plans were to come to pass, the liberal electorate in Bulgaria would have to be able to perceive the subtle differences between the liberal Movement for Rights and Freedoms, Kasim Dal’s centrist liberal party which is part of the government, a possible future national-liberal formation set up by Lyutvi Mestan and the National Movement for Stability and Progress (NDSV) which is not represented in parliament now, but which once went by the name of National Movement Simeon II and formed a cabinet – the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha cabinet – jointly with the DPS.

During the Stanishev cabinet the DPS was also part of the government, this time the left-wing cabinet of the Bulgarian Socialist Party jointly with the NDSV, but now the DPS’ deposed chairman is saying that the movement’s future lies in the right-of-centre spectrum. This is an opinion shared by previous breakaway members of the movement like Gyuner Tahir who, back in the late 1990s, gambled on partnership with Ivan Kostov’s Union of Democratic Forces, or like Kasim Dal and Korman Ismailov, now part of the right-wing Reformist Bloc.

In Bulgaria, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms is usually seen as a pro-Turkish formation, but now Lyutvi Mestan is saying that in the time he headed the movement he did his best to keep the party from being pigeonholed as an “oligarchic pro-Russian party”, saying that he had been dismissed from the post just before Christmas because he had “trodden on a Russian mine”. These words came as something of a surprise, with his opponents saying that the mine that got Mestan expelled from the DPS was Turkish not Russian. Bulgarians associate pro-Russian sentiments with the left-wing Bulgarian Socialist Party and the nationalists from Ataka and nobody remembers the DPS ever having taken a pro-Russian line. But the man who “trod on a Russian mine”, Lyutvi Mestan also rejected the accusation of having acted in the benefit of Turkey, describing the declaration on behalf of the DPS he was still chairing, exonerating Ankara for shooting down a Russian aircraft, as pro-Euro-Atlantic and not pro-Turkish. So, by making these and other claims, instead of making the circumstances of his dismissal any clearer, the former chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms caused further confusion, leaving voters with the unanswered question of who is a liberal, who has pro-Turkish, pro-Russian or pro-Euro-Atlantic sentiments in Bulgaria.

The result? The upheaval in the Movement for Rights and Freedoms is undermining the political representation of the Turkish electorate in the country, scattering the liberal political spectrum and tugging it to the right, something that can only serve to prove true the hypothesis of the emergence of just one dominant party in Bulgaria – GERB.

English version: Milena Daynova