By a decision issued on Thursday, Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court ruled that 16 MPs in the 51st National Assembly were unlawfully elected on October 27, 2024.

Of the 16 MPs concerned, four represent GERB-UDF, including one who entered parliament after Temenuzhka Petkova was elected minister of finance. Morality, Unity, Honour (MECh) and There Is Such a People (TISP) had three MPs each outlawed, Movement for Rights and Freedoms – New Beginning and Vazrazhdane two each, and Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB), BSP-Democratic Bulgaria and the Alliance for Rights and Freedoms (ARF) one each.

The Constitutional Court assigned to the Central Election Commission (CEC) to declare the results of the October 27, 2024 elections of national representatives and make public the allocation of seats and the names of the elected MPs on the basis of the decision.

After the recalculation of the results, the 4% electoral threshold for the allocation of seats equals 97,390.44 valid votes cast in Bulgaria and abroad, excluding the None Of The Above votes, the Court pointed out.

The Velichie Party received 97,497 votes, or 59 more than before the recalculation. Before that, it was short of the threshold for entry into the legislature.

As a result of the recalculation, Vazrazhdane gained 108 votes to a total of 325,358, MECh gained 28 votes, TISP gained 31 votes, CC-DB gained 11 votes, and the ARF gained 1 vote.

The GERB-UDF coalition lost 452 votes, and BSP-United Left lost 42 votes.

The Constitutional Court assigned to CEC to declare the results of the October 27, 2024 elections of national representatives and make public the allocation of seats and the names of the elected MPs on the basis of the decision.

On November 26, 2024, the Constitutional Court admitted for consideration on the merits five petitions, submitted by various parties and parliamentary groups, challenging the legitimacy of the early parliamentary elections held on October 27, 2024. The Court commissioned a group of experts to recount the votes cast by paper ballots and machine-voting ballots in 1,777 voting sections. The expert witnesses were asked to establish whether the valid votes cast matched the entry in the section commission tally sheet and whether the valid machine-voting ballots matched the data in the memory of the machine-voting technical device. The experts were also supposed to establish whether the number of invalid ballots entered in the tally sheets of 442 voting sections corresponds to the number of invalid ballots delivered by section commissions to constituency commissions.

CEC asked election services operator Information Services PLC to enter the relevant data and do the numbers as required by the Court. CEC transmitted the recalculation to the Constitutional Court on Wednesday.