23 July 2009 / TODAY'S ZAMAN WITH WIRES, ANKARA
Bulgarian prosecutors plan to present allegations of irregularities in voting procedures in Turkey during Bulgaria's recent general elections to the country's constitutional court, according to reports in the Bulgarian media.
The prosecutors' statement came a day after the extreme-right Order, Law and Justice Party (RZS) said Tuesday that they would also ask the Central Electoral Commission to collect and review all ballot papers that were received from the Turkish polling stations, the Sofia News Agency reported. RZS leader Yane Yanev on Tuesday described the Bulgarian election results from Turkish voting booths as “totally corrupt,” suggesting that there had been a huge number of “phantom votes,” the agency said. For the July 5 parliamentary elections, Bulgaria opened 123 polling stations in Turkey, where thousands of Muslim Bulgarians live after many of them were forced by the communist regime to leave Bulgaria in the 1980s. Around 95,000 voters cast their ballots in those stations. The Turkish minority party, Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), gained 38 seats in the 240-seat parliament, in an election where RZS and the ultranationalist party Ataka used anti-Turkish discourse as their main campaign tactic. Yanev recently suggested that it was absolutely impossible for the polling stations in Turkey to have dealt with 1,600 people each, especially as “7 percent of the voters there could not even read or speak Bulgarian.”
