Bulgaria’s Foreign Ministry summoned Turkish ambassador Aylin Sekizkök to urge her country’s institutions not to interfere in its elections, the ministry said on November 18 as quoted by The Sofia Globe.
The meeting came three days before Bulgaria holds a second round of presidential elections, following the first round and early parliamentary elections on November 14, and on the day that caretaker Interior Minister Boiko Rashkov alleged that Turkey was interfering in Bulgaria’s elections.
The Foreign Ministry said that the ministry’s permanent secretary, Ivan Kondov, had “expressed the expectation that Turkish institutions and officials will categorically refrain from propaganda actions and political messages” regarding the November 21 run-off in the presidential elections.
Rashkov had cited the actions of representative bodies in Turkey and articles in the Turkish media, saying that he saw these as interference in Bulgaria’s domestic affairs.
Sunday’s run-off is between incumbent President Roumen Radev, backed by a range of parties, and Anastas Gerdzhikov, the latter backed by Boiko Borissov’s GERB-UDF electoral coalition.
A major player in Bulgarian politics, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), which has a significant support base among Bulgarians of Turkish ethnicity and an electoral stronghold in Turkey, has not endorsed either of these presidential candidates by name.
On November 17, MRF leader Mustafa Karadayi said that the party’s leadership was leaving it up to the MRF electorate, whom he described as wise, to decide which candidate to support.
At the same time, the profile of the candidate who should be supported, as described by Karadayi, largely matched the campaign messaging of Gerdzhikov, who has sought to portray himself as a unifier and Radev as someone who has brought division to the nation.
Bulgarian media pointed out that the MRF in Istanbul, on its Facebook page, had posted a Turkish-language appeal to vote for the Gerdzhikov presidential ticket. By November 18, that post had been taken down. / Argumentum.al
