Bulgaria's Ex-King Simeon Steps Down From Politics

Who was King then became the Prime minister? This is a certain trivia question which everyone in Bulgaria should know. Simeon Saxe-Coburg was exactly that, the King of Bulgaria when he was a child and after many years in exile became Bulgaria’s Prime Minister. Unfortunately he was their Minister during very hard times and wasn’t successful amid allegations of being rather selfish in the reasons he came back. Another spell as Simeon as Prime Minister since then has been distanced and now died a death. This is time for the ex-King nad ex-Prime Minister to step back from the political front something that many Bulgarians feel he shoud have done years ago.

Bulgaria's former King Simeon Saxe-Coburg resigned Monday as leader of NMSP, a junior partner in the outgoing coalition government, after his party lost all of its seats in Sunday's election.

Saxe-Coburg, Europe's only royal to become prime minister, saw his National Movement for Stability and Prosperity (NMSP) party punished along with the ruling Socialists, for failing to clean up rampant corruption and soften the blow of the global downturn.

"I am taking the responsibility (for the weak results)," Saxe-Coburg told a news conference, a day after results showed his party failed to get the necessary four percent of votes to remain in parliament. "Nobody is irreplaceable or eternal."

Bulgaria's centre-right GERB party was searching for a coalition partner Monday to help it tackle urgent reforms to combat corruption and recession, after winning Sunday's national election.

Saxe-Coburg, the only living person to have borne the title tsar, spent most of his life in exile and was welcomed as a saviour when he permanently returned to the Balkan country in 2001.

Tired of years of slow reforms following the collapse of communism in 1989, Bulgarians hoped the former monarch would fix all of their problems and resoundingly elected him prime minister in 2001, a position he held until 2005.
His cabinet restructured Bulgaria's Soviet-era foreign debt, won investor trust and moved the Balkan nation closer to European Union membership that came in 2007. But disappointment prevailed over its failure to boost living standards.

Critics said he had entered politics to win back lands and estates owned by his family before the communist regime sent them into exile in 1946. But Saxe-Coburg has argued he did it because of a "sense of duty for his motherland."

Simeon became Tsar in 1943 aged six, but ruled for just three years before the communist regime abolished the monarchy and sent the royals into exile.

He said Monday he had no plans to leave Bulgaria after spending 50 years in exile, mainly in Madrid.

Source: www.swissinfo.ch