Bulgaria Ex-Sports Minister to Follow Expelled DPS Leader Mestan

Mariyana Georgieva, a lawmaker with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), has declared she will "follow" Lyutvi Mestan who was removed from the office of party leader last week.

In a statement sent out to daily 24 Chasa, she has called him "the last person who could be accused of anti-secular behavior" and has asserted everything he has done or will do is "in the name of... Bulgaria's Euro-Atlantic development".

Georgieva, however, has stopped short of saying whether or not she will leave DPS's group in Parliament, as three other MPs did last week.

Mestan was expelled from the DPS after last week's reports that the movement's honorary chair, Ahmed Dogan, had criticized him over the position which he adopted on the downing of a Russian Su-24 plane over the Turkey-Syria border and in which he sided with Turkey.

He has not yet commented on whether or not he will launch his own political project.

"There is nothing more ridiculous than labeling him "a national traitor", "an Islamist" and so on, features which do not match his indisputable profile of a liberal-democrat," Georgieva has added, in an apparent reference to recent days' suggestions that after the infighting at the DPS began, an Islamist project is the most likely scenario to follow.

She was Minister of Sports in the previous elected government of Bulgaria, between May 2013 and July 2014, when the DPS was a junior coalition partner to the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP).