Today, the first day of the week, the National Council for Tripartite Cooperation is to discuss the government-proposed amendments to the Ministry of the Interior Act. Yesterday, not long after the parliamentary internal security and public order committee rejected the text, Interior Minister Rumyana Bachvarova said for the Bulgarian National Radio that she would not be scrapping it.

The only votes “for” came from the GERB party MPs, though even they, as their parliamentary group chair Tsvetan Tsvetanov said were against, but decided to give their support out of “political loyalty”. Minister Bachvarova took heart when Prime Minister Boyko Borissov insisted that the proposed amendments be discussed by parliament as soon as possible, despite the unfortunate turn of events at its internal security committee. National Assembly President Tsetska Tsacheva confirmed they would - probably out of political loyalty too.

Another episode that generated tensions inside the ruling party took place less than a month ago, when the GERB parliamentary faction demanded that the prime minister justify why people from the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria (DSB) were being tolerated as cabinet ministers. There are many inside GERB who say that after the DSB chose to be in opposition, its members appointed to key positions in the administration should be let go. And not without reason - after being part of the ruling coalition for one year, the DSB decided to withdraw its support for the government and to opt for forming an anti-corruption alliance against it, yet the Reformist Bloc - a partner to GERB in the government - has not formally withdrawn from the coalition. PM Borissov ended the discussion stating that in light of the terror in Brussels, the internal problems with the DSB did not deserve any comment and he wasn't interested in any “divorce proceedings”. Again, probably out of political loyalty, the MPs agreed with this.

After the bitter fight over the judicial reform in the country, at the end of last year Minister of Justice Hristo Ivanov tendered his resignation in protest against it. Now the demand is for the resignation of Health Minister Petar Moskov, a DSB nomination, over the controversial reform in the public health system. But neither is Moskov submitting his resignation nor is the prime minister asking for it. One would think that with such a mess and so much controversy in such a short space of time, the popularity of the ruling party would go down and that of the opposition - up. Yet sociologists have registered a trend that is quite the opposite. According to latest Exacta Research data, GERB is still the leading political force with an approval rating of 24.3 percent. The biggest opposition party - the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) comes second, though with a meagre 13.2 percent. Though far from united, approval for the junior partner in the ruling coalition, the Reformist Bloc at 5.5 percent is almost equal to the approval for the habitual third political force in parliament, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms with 5.7 percent. And this is so because there is, as yet, no alternative to GERB in the offing. Bulgarian Socialist Party leader Mihail Mikov made it clear just before his party's congress that the socialists were yet to assert themselves as an opposition, an alternative to the ruling party. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) - a party recently split in two and criticized by its own dissidents as “a Gordian knot of corruption, oligarchy and pro-Russian interests” in Bulgaria, is no alternative either. Not to mention the nationalists - there is no way Ataka party can win over voters with a leader convicted of hooliganism or the Patriotic Front, which is, in practical term, an ally to the current administration. Despite the friction and the failures, the ruling GERB party has not lost any support for fear that without them, things would actually be even worse.

English version: Milena Daynova