Bulgarian politician Sergey Stanishev has announced that he will not run for a fourth term as leader of the Party of European Socialists when the party elects its president at a congress in Berlin on 14-15 October.
Speaking in Sofia on Friday (September 16), Stanishev, a former Bulgarian prime minister who has been the PES leader for 11 years, blamed his bad relations with the leadership of the Bulgarian Socialist Party as the main reason for his decision to stand down.
The deadline for nominations expired on Thursday, and the candidacy of Stefan Löven, former prime minister of Sweden, was submitted, Stanishev announced.
“You can’t be the chairman of PES if you don’t have a strong party behind you,” Stanishev said, adding that although he has received a lot of support to seek a new term, he would not stand without being nominated by the BSP. He accused the BSP of having lost a lot of credibility and its European identity under the leadership of Cornelia Ninova, who took over BSP in 2016.
“The BSP went in a different direction,” says Stanishev. “There is no way that a party that wants to emulate Viktor Orban’s party can produce a PES president,” he added, referring to the Hungarian prime minister and his Fidesz party.
The BSP advertises itself as a left-wing party but has begun to develop a distinctly nationalist profile in order to retain its ageing and largely pro-Russian electorate. The party also sided with Bulgarian nationalists and opposed the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, which aims to tackle violence against women, while Stanishev lobbied for ratification.
Stanishev criticized the current leader Ninova for not attending congresses and other PES events abroad.
“Unfortunately, the BSP has lost a lot of trust, a lot of European identity in recent years,” explained Stanishev. Relations between Stanishev and Ninova began to deteriorate sharply when the BSP was preparing for the European elections in 2019.
Despite Ninova’s resistance, Stanishev managed to assert himself and was elected to the European Parliament on the BSP list.
In Sofia, Stanishev praised the successes of the PES under his leadership. “We are the most united political family in the EU,” he said.
He expressed his concern about the multiple crises in Europe, including the energy crisis, inflation, and the EU’s economic dependence on external factors, while warning that the war in Ukraine could spread across Europe.
Stanishev criticized the decision by the ousted government of Kiril Petkov, in which the BSP was a partner, to expel more than 70 Russian diplomats from Bulgaria and to buy liquefied gas to replace Russian gas.
[Edited by Benjamin Fox/Zoran Radosavljevic]
Source: euractiv.com
