PRESS REVIEW – Monday, November 2: Bulgarian papers discuss the country's new president. In Belarus, some political prisoners are held in psychiatric wards instead of prisons. Also: Hitler's Eagle's Nest burned down.
Will it be rebuilt and should it? Finally, the queen of Halloween, Heidi Klum, flaunts her most disgusting costume yet. Bulgarian paper **Capital** headlines with "Iliana Iotova has been elected president – her victory seals the new status quo".
Iotova was an independent candidate, but supported by the Bulgarian Socialist Party and by Prime Minister Rumen Radev's party, Progressive Bulgaria. She ran against Andrey Gyurov, who was backed by Bulgaria's pro-Western parties. As a reminder, she was the president's vice president for nine years, before he resigned and was elected PM.
The liberal and pro-Western paper writes that now, Radev and his ruling party have consolidated their control over the three branches of government –the National Assembly,the government and the presidency, which had previously acted as a political counterbalance. Now, the only remaining counterbalance to the government is the justice system. The paper says that the elections have also deepened divisions within Bulgarians and called into question the country's direction after Communism and the choice between Russia and Western allies. **Dnevnik** looks at who exactly Iotova is: Bulgaria's first woman president.
She has already spent many years at the political top, always supported by the Communists and later Socialists. After the fall of one of the country's most prominent Communist leaders in 1996 and during the post-Communist transition, she was the head of the Bulgarian Socialist Party's press centre. She then took part in national politics, with stints as an MEP, vice president and now president.
In Belarus, human rights groups warn of a dangerous practice.**Radio Free Europe** writes that at least 22 political prisoners are being held in psychiatric hospitals and not traditional prisons.Locking up critics of the government in psychiatric facilities has long been a method used in Soviet countries. Human rights defenders and doctors say that the method "has found a modern resurgence" in Belarus.The prisoners have to undergo compulsory psychiatric treatment that has no predetermined end date.That means the prisoners are out of the conventional prison system and they cannot benefit from amnesties, for instance, and other basic rights. Elsewhere, the Eagle's Nest, one of the last structural relics of Adolf Hitler's dictatorship, burned down in a suspected arson attack last month.
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