It is a real challenge to explain to Radio Bulgaria's multilingual listeners around the world, who are not privy to the Bulgarian political vaudeville, what has been happening in our political life in the last few days. That is why we sought the help of political scientists and observers.

"They are treating state affairs like a poker game, which is unacceptable to me," said Svetlin Tachev, a political analyst from the Gallup agency, in an interview with Radio Bulgaria. - All these press briefings lately make us think that behind the veil, there is arm-twisting to achieve interests so that if a government is formed, all of the coalition partners will be satisfied with what has been achieved. 

The problem is that this arm-twisting may ultimately lead to early elections, and we are already one step away from that. Early elections are an extremely bad scenario for the country, because we have to pass laws, we have to reform the judiciary. Bulgaria needs to move towards Schengen and the eurozone. We are also in a very delicate geopolitical situation with the war in Ukraine, so there are too many things that need political stability, and moreover, the citizens themselves, for the most part, do not want new parliamentary elections.

The political analyst pointed to the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and its co-leader Delyan Peevski - sanctioned by the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the Global Magnitsky Act - as one of the possible obstacles to an agreement. At the moment, however, we are dealing with a new situation, Tachev points out:

"If in the first nine months democratic Bulgaria needed the MRF to pass constitutional amendments, this need is not on the agenda, which in turn means that they would like to see them excluded.  The MRF has no such desire, as is clear from Delyan Peevski's statements ("When you are in trouble and need support, you are with the MRF, and when you need to prove yourself, you start using the MRF as a stepping-stone" - his address on the MRF website). When it comes to voting on regulatory issues, where qualified majority voting is required, DB will have to seek the help of a Euro-Atlantic political formation. This profile, of course, includes the MRF, which to some extent probably frightens GERB's coalition partners - the SDS - and they are likely to try to get away from it". 

In the last hours the need to make sense of the MRF's role in the government has become even more urgent. All the more so after co-leader Peevski's categorical statement that he is now at the negotiating table, so that if and when his party is asked for support, it will be in front of all voters.

Political analyst Milen Lyubenov is more sceptical about the fruitfulness of the dialogue between GERB-SDS and PP-DB.

"Even if they reach an agreement and there is a rotation in government, the prospects for such a cabinet are not good, and probably in a few months we will be back to the same situation of political scandals and tensions, which will again lead us to early parliamentary elections - Lyubenov says. - And then the stakes for the political parties will be much higher, because they do not realise now that all their actions will lead to the break-up of the current party system and the possible emergence of new political actors who will settle on this terrain. And my fear is that these could be populist, authoritarian parties that could divert Bulgaria from its European path.