Six members of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, including former chairman Lutvi Mestan have officially expressed their will to leave the parliamentary floor of the party. Mestan was ousted before the Christmas holidays after his blunder with showing solidarity with Turkey about the case with the downed Russian fighter jet. The seceders left the movement quietly, without making special declarations and this seemed the end of the sharp dispute over what happened. This impression is reaffirmed by the fact the topic is not a central one for the press.

Six MPs leaving the parliamentary group of MRF leaves the balance of forces in parliament basically unchanged. Seceders are too few to create their own parliamentary group and will now become independent MPs, as they are not allowed to join any of the other parliamentary floors.

MRF remains with 30 MPs now but it is still the third largest political power. First is the ruling GERB party with 84 MPs and second is the opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party with 38 MPs. The sum of the votes of the two largest opposition parties - BSP and MRF is still smaller than those of the ruling GERB party, even without counting the votes of its smaller coalition partner - the Reformist Bloc.

Judging by some preliminary statements made by Lyutvi Mestan one can say the now independent MPs would probably tend to support the rightist parties and this is to the benefit of the ruling majority.

In such circumstances, the government will be even more stable than before and in the near future there are no prospects of early parliamentary elections. Despite the fact it is interwoven with compromises, the government remains stable which is something good for this country at the backdrop of ongoing refugee crisis in Europe.

Ultimately, the recent turmoil in the party that has the support of Turks in the country, did not go beyond the framework of an internal party issue, similarly to past situations in which other prominent leaders like Osman Oktay and Kasim Dal were removed from the party. Oktay and Dal both tried to create political projects after they dropped out of MRF but achieved modest results. Probably such would be the results of Lutfi Mestan if he tried to launch a new political project in the liberal political space. Analysts expect that MRF would not split because six MPs left the party. These are few of MRF’s MPs and also the party’s electorate has unshakable instinct for unity.

During the dramatic events related to Mestan’s ouster a series of serious questions were brought up. Did Mestan place MRF in favour of Turkey to the detriment of national interests? Why did he seek protection at the Embassy of Ankara in Sofia after his ouster? Why was he stripped of state-provided security? Why were there attempts by Turkish officials for interference in an internal problem of a Bulgarian party? There are a number of such questions, which Bulgarian society is painfully sensitive to, but it would hardly receive a satisfactory answer to them.

English: Alexander Markov