Bulgaria A Surprise at the Top

Although they won more than half the seats in the 400-member parliament in June's elections, Bulgaria's former Communist leaders have been struggling to keep a grip on power and hold their newly renamed Bulgarian Socialist Party together. The internal crisis was triggered early last month when President Petar Mladenov, who deposed longtime Stalinist leader Todor Zhivkov in November 1989, stepped down under pressure. Mladenov had angered opposition groups and liberal members of his party by suggesting that tanks be used to break up a pro-democracy demonstration last December.

After Mladenov's departure, the Socialist leadership agreed in principle ^ that a non-Socialist should fill the presidency. But last week saw their hopes of installing a candidate of their choice dashed. After five ballots ended in deadlock, members of parliament, by a vote of 284 to 105, elected as President Zhelyu Zhelev, the leader of the opposition Union of Democratic Forces. Zhelev, who ran unopposed after all parties withdrew their initial candidates, needed a two-thirds majority of the members present to win.

In the June balloting the U.D.F. had won only 144 seats, compared with the Socialists' 211. But Zhelev, 55, a philosopher turned politician and longtime anticommunist, managed to hold his own fractious movement together at a time when the rifts in the Socialist Party were growing wider daily. In the end, he won the presidency with the help of votes from reformers within the Socialist Party. The new President will have the power to call fresh parliamentary elections.

Zhelev's victory threw the former Communists into further disarray: several party branches and many prominent officials immediately announced that they would break away from the Socialist Party. Reformers, who were planning a purge of the Old Guard at a party congress in October, welcomed the resignation threats. So did protesters camped in front of the presidential palace, who have vowed that they will remain there until all Communist hard- liners are removed from government.

Zhelev says he wants a "strong, competent government"; observers believe that will mean an administration of technocrats drawn from both the Socialists and the U.D.F. The new Prime Minister is likely to be Socialist leader Andrei Lukanov, 52, one of the party's leading reformers. Urbane and articulate, Lukanov was Prime Minister under Mladenov and stayed on as the party leader when Mladenov was forced out. Lukanov has the support of many opposition leaders because of his grasp of economic issues and generally evenhanded approach to political problems. He favors a government of national unity, arguing that broad consensus will be needed to implement the drastic economic changes necessary to remodel a dispirited and state-dominated economy along free-market lines.