Turkey & Macedonia

Bulgaria on Wednesday recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Turkey amid a probe into voting irregularities during Bulgaria’s July 5 general election, the foreign ministry said in a statement.

Prosecutors in October opened a probe into allegations that voters with dual Bulgarian and Turkish citizenship had voted twice, while people who did not turn up at polling stations in Turkey were registered as having voted.

A total of 94,000 people voted in 123 polling stations across Turkey in the election, despite protests by nationalists against the unprecedented number of polling stations opened in Bulgaria’s southern neighbor.

Most of the ballots from polling stations in Turkey were cast for the Turkish minority party Movement for Rights and Freedoms, or MRF, which won 38 seats in the 240-seat parliament.

But the nationalist Order, Lawfulness, Justice Party recently said that election documents from polling stations in Turkey contained huge discrepancies between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, mainly for the MRF.

According to electoral commission member Mihail Konstantinov, the MRF won as many as five parliamentary seats thanks to votes cast in Turkey.

Concerning the U.S. envoy, press reports earlier this week said the embassy in Washington had lost its election results documentation.

Bulgaria’s July 5 vote was won by the new right-wing GERB party of Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who ran a strong anti-corruption platform and vowed to introduce changes to election laws in order to prevent manipulation.