Bulgaria announced the preliminary results of the June 17 parliamentary elections. The big winner is the National Movement Simeon II (NDSV), the party created by the former king of Bulgaria, Simeon II. The NDSV got 43.5 percent of the vote. The outgoing ruling alliance of the Union of Democratic Forces (ODS) finished second (18.2 percent). The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) may have gotten around ten percent. The ethnic Turk Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) got around seven percent. This is interesting since Turks constitute about ten percent of the Bulgarian population. Simeon was exiled from Bulgaria in 1946, at the age of nine. He lived in Madrid, Spain, as a businessman. Simeon maintained his Bulgarian citizenship and his son has served as an appointee in the ODS government. Simeon ran on an anti-corruption and reform program. Critics accuse the Tsar of running a nostalgia campaign. However, ODS politicians are notoriously corrupt. The telling scandal was that of Balkan Airlines, which was privatized in 1999 but went into receivership in February 2001. Several ODS leaders were implicated in a kickback scheme involving the airline. Still, the ODS hasnt been all bad. The ODS established a Bulgarian currency board (1997) and pegged the Bulgarian lev to the deutsche mark. Inflation has been low, in part because the currency board has been so effective.