November 7 (SeeNews) - Traditional support for governing GERB party from the center-right electorate in big cities dwindled in the first round of Bulgaria's presidential elections, Boryana Dimitrova from Alfa Research polling agency said on Monday in an interview for local Nova TV station.
Partial results from Sunday's vote show that the candidate of main opposition Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leads over GERB's candidate but falls short of outright victory, which points to a run-off on November 13. With 85.68% of the votes counted, Socialists-backed former Air Force commander Rumen Radev won 25.76%, while GERB's candidate, Parliament speaker Tsetska Tsacheva, came in second with 21.97% , according to figures published on the central election commission's website.
According to Dimitrova, the big surprise in the elections came from the results in the capital Sofia, where Rumen Radev won 25% of the vote, a lead of 1% over Tsacheva. In the previous presidential elections held in 2011, GERB’s candidate and incumbent President, Rosen Plevneliev, won 47% of the vote in Sofia. GERB also held high support in Sofia during the last parliamentary elections held in 2014, Dimitrova added.
Other big cities have also been a traditional source of support for GERB, but this time the Socialists-backed candidate won a higher number of votes there than GERB’s candidate.
“This constitutes a dramatic decline,” Dimitrova said, citing GERB’s victory in the big cities in the local elections held in 2015.
GERB’s electorate from the 2014 parliamentary elections has punished the party in the presidential vote, Jivko Georgiev from Gallup International Balkan told public TV broadcaster BNT. Around 40-45% of the people who elected members of parliament put forward by GERB in 2014, on Sunday voted for candidates other than Tsacheva.
At the same time, Radev won a major portion of the votes of those who had not voted in the 2009 parliamentary elections - a change which might be attributed to the mandatory voting introduced for the first time for the 2016 presidential elections, Georgiev added.
GERB won 39.7 % of the vote in 2009 elections versus 17.7% for BSP.