GOTZE DELCHEV, Bulgaria, June 22, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - A party representing the Muslim minority in Bulgaria would join a coalition with the Socialists after the June 25 elections, dealing a death blow to the ruling center-right party.

"We will participate in the next government. We will most probably ally ourselves with the left," Ahmed Dogan, the leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), told Agence France Presse (AFP) Wednesday, June 22.

"Due to the European Union funds to be absorbed by the next government, it will have the most resources since the time of communism," he said, asserting these should be used to raise Bulgarians' standard of living.

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) seems set to win most votes in the national elections, but not the enough majority to govern alone.

Opinion polls give the BSP 36 to 45 percent of the vote, compared to 24 for the ruling National Movement (NMSII) and 10 percent each for the MRF and the right-wing Union of Democratic Forces (UDF).

"We count on having 25 to 30 deputies in the next 240-seat parliament," Dogan said during a campaign rally in the predominantly Muslim southern town of Gotze Delchev.

The MRF joined the government in 2001 for the first time after winning 20 seats in the elections that year.

It has two ministers, seven deputy ministers and three regional governors.

In the last municipal elections in 2003, the party won 10 percent of the vote -- the same result scored by the NMSII.

The MRF was created during the communist rule in Bulgaria in response to the regime's brutal assimilation campaign against the Muslim minority in the country.

It commands support from the 800,000-strong ethnic Turk community in Bulgaria as well as from the so-called Pomacs -- Slavs who embraced Islam during the Ottoman rule -- and a small group of Muslim Gypsies.

Support for the MRF is strongest in the tobacco-growing southern regions around Kurdzhali and in the northeastern town of Razgrad, with its high Turkish population.

The BSP, the reformed and renamed communist party that ruled Bulgaria for 45 years, said a coalition with the MRF after the national elections as "possible".

"Even if we win an absolute majority we will still try to form a broad coalition in order to be better equipped against the challenges posed by our accession to the European Union" in 2007, BSP deputy leader Roumen Ovcharov told AFP.

Political analyst Mira Yanova said the BSP "does not speak too openly of a coalition with the MRF so as not to alienate more nationalist voters, particularly those who live in the south with its strong Muslim population".

However, the idea of teaming up with the ex-communist party drew anger from several Bulgarian Muslims.

Fatme, a 53-year-old woman, recalled her ordeal under the communist rule.

She said she was forced to change her name to the Christian Ilka in 1973 as part of the Communist campaign to destroy a strong Turkish identity.

"For weeks we lit fires in the square to protest. One night the police stormed the village. I was beaten, my husband spent three days in detention, and my dad went to jail."

Seated near a memorial for five victims of those same events, an old man who refused to give his name said he did not want to hear about a government made up of the MRF and the ex-communists.