2009 Bulgarian parliamentary election

Bulgarian parliamentary election, 2009

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Turnout	60.2%
Party Leader % Seats ± GERB Boyko Borisov 39.7 117 New KB Sergei Stanishev 17.7 40 -42 DPS Ahmed Dogan 14.0 37 +3 ATAKA Volen Siderov 9.4 21 0 SDS+DSB Martin Dimitrov, Ivan Kostov 6.8 15 -22 RZS Yane Yanev 4.1 10 New This lists parties that won seats. See the complete results below.
Distribution of votes by constituency
Prime Minister before Prime Minister after Sergei Stanishev BSP Boyko Borisov GERB

Parliamentary elections were held in Bulgaria on 5 July 2009. With 40% of the vote, the decisive winner of the elections was the established in 2006 personalistic party of Boyko Borisov - GERB. The Socialist Party, in power before the election, was in second place, with around 18%. Оnce-ruling National Movement Simeon II did not cross the 4% threshold and won no seats. The turnout was 60.2%, one of the lowest ever. Following the election, GERB leader Boyko Borisov became Prime Minister. Just like all the previous parliamentary elections since the fall of communism, the government was not re-elected.

The 2009 elections saw the debut of a parallel voting system with a lesser plurality vote element. 209 of the 240 parliament seats were distributed according to the proportional system, while the remaining 31 (the number of voting constituencies in Bulgaria) were allocated for First Past the Post.

The ruling Bulgarian Socialist Party wanted to amend the electoral law, increasing state subsidies for political parties threefold (the reason for doing this would be making campaign financing more transparent, they claim), requiring registration in at least two-thirds of all electoral districts (thus eliminating most marginal parties).

An electoral reform was passed in April 2009 with the votes of the BSP, the DPS, Ataka and Order, Law and Justice. It would raise the election threshold for alliances from 4% to 8% (which was widely seen as a move against the opposition electoral alliance of DSB and SDS, which was polling around 7.3% at that time) and established that 31 of the 240 seats would be elected by majority vote. President Georgi Parvanov returned the law to parliament for reconsideration, but as the parties had no plans to amend it and as he could only return the law once, he had to sign it before the election. After the law had been passed, the provision raising the electoral threshold was struck down by the Constitutional Court of Bulgaria.