Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov’s centre-right GERB party is set to win the most votes from Sunday’s election, data from the central electoral commission showed on Monday, but it may struggle to muster a majority.
With 25.6 percent of votes after two-thirds of ballots were counted, Borissov, 61, who has dominated Bulgarian politics for more than a decade, will have the largest party in the next parliament.
But anger over corruption weighed on the campaign period, and he could find it hard to build a coalition.
The new anti-establishment party, There Is Such a People, of popular TV host and singer Slavi Trifonov, was running second with 18.3 percent of votes, followed by the opposition Socialists with 14.9 percent, data showed.
Full official results are expected on Thursday.
A recent United States report on human rights also highlighted serious problems with judicial independence and media freedom in the country.
President Rumen Radev, who supported last year’s anti-government protests and has been a vehement critic of Borissov, said he had “voted against the destruction of the rule of law”.
“These elections are a step towards returning to normality,” he added. (Aljazeera)