Get rid of your government and choose it again*

The general elections in Bulgaria are over. But the circus just begins.

Circus, not crisis.

The turnout was just above 50%. In comparison, in 2009 it was 60%. The decrease is actually surprising, because of the weekly protests in the last few months. They made me believe that our civil society is getting more active than I have ever seen it. This appeared to be just an illusion and the fact that Bristol, Cardiff and Bath together couldn’t get 100 registration forms from their Bulgarian residents that would have led to the creation of a polling station in Bristol, should have been a good sign, even before the actual elections. As a matter of fact there are 184 Bulgarians only in Bristol (as the answer of my latest FOI request revealed) and 100 forms from the three cities are not that impossible.

The results themselves show that GERB, the Bulgarian Socialists Party (BSP), DPS (the party of the Turkish minority) and Ataka (the Bulgarian equivalent of UKIP) have made it above the 4% barrier and will have their MPs. If we go back to 2009, we will see that GERB had 20% more than BSP (who were part of a coalition at the time) and managed to form its own government. This time none of the parties has above 50%, so we should witness a coalition. Or new elections.

Apart from the low turnout, what I don’t understand is how people have such a short memory and although they made Boyko Borisov and GERB resign just a couple of months ago, they still voted for them. However, this proves once again that the PR of the party works and they really managed to use their resignation as a way to win new voters. Maybe not as many, as they wished, but have they not resigned their results would have been even lower.
The other interesting point that follows from the election results is that 25% of the votes went to different small parties that couldn’t go above 4%. Probably this is to show how dissatisfied these 25% are with the “mainstream” parties.

The results also led to the resignations of many of the leaders of the losing political parties.

What follows now?

After the exact results are published, negotiations will begin. GERB and BSP are the two parties with most voters, but it’s not likely that they will make a coalition together. The most credible scenario is a coalition between either BSP, DPS and Ataka; or just BSP and DPS, depending on the exact numbers of MPs. DPS and Ataka together sounds strange enough, having in mind that the first party represents the ethnic Turkish minority and the second are nationalists. However, the leader of Ataka seems to have somehow accepted in the night of the elections that they might have to work together.

If no coalition is formed, we will have new elections. How different will the results be, probably depends only on the number of underhand tactics that the parties will use. But what I forecast are some more months of circus performances. And if this is the case, don’t think that I am a fortune-teller, because (as UKIP might put it) it’s just “common sense”.

*Although there is a chance that it might not make it into the ruling coalition.

What’s happening in Bulgaria? – For dummies

If you happen to read some extracts from the Bulgarian newspapers from today, you might think that the seven million population has some deep emotional problems, as the word “tears” is one of the most frequently used. But what is the reason for this behavior from both politicians and ordinary people?

The facts

For around a week there have been protests in all major cities in Bulgaria. Originally the reason was the high price of the electricity, but later on they turned into protests against the government and as a whole everything that has been done wrong since 1989. And this is quite a lot.

It should be pointed out, that in the last years Bulgaria has not seen so large-scale protests with so many participants from so various backgrounds.

Days later the finance minister resigned or was discharged (various interpretations). Mr Dyankov is famous for his hard politic and the habit to say “No!”, if the government can’t allow to spend money on something. This led to a stable financial politic in the last years and Bulgaria being one of the “excellent students” in the EU. The reason for him leaving his post is that Boyko Borisov (the PM) wasn’t happy with the postponed payments to the farmers.

Mr Borisov was then confident that he will keep trying to take control over the situation with the protests. He promised that the best has been done to cope with the companies responsible for the high prices of the electricity (all foreign-owned).

However, on the next morning he went into the Parliament and announced that he is resigning. He, furthermore, asked all MPs from his party GERB to do the same, although there isn’t such a procedure in the constitution.

Today the MPs voted on the resignation and it was officially accepted.

In the meantime the protests haven’t stopped, but now ironically the people are protesting for  Boyko Borisov and his government and not against him. The president should now appoint a new caretaker government and elections will follow shortly after that.

My interpretation 

The tears I told you about earlier are from various people – citizens, journalists and even Boyko Borisov. He might need to cry due to the whole amount of stress that he is receiving in the last days. But I can never get why are the rest crying and believing all that they are seeing?

To begin with, until the beginning of the protests everybody was complaining from the government. Suddenly, now when Borisov resigns, a lot of people want him back, because he is seen as “the only one who can change things”.

Let me look into the groups of the protesters from my comfortable chair in Bristol. I think that it will explain a lot. It might not be the complete truth, but this is what I see when monitoring the media and social networks and when talking with Bulgarians from around the globe.

• Surely, there are people who were on the protests against him and are now on the protests for him. They are protesting just for the sake of it. Being a Bulgarian, I can understand that they want things changed and some may see the only way to achieve this in the protests.
• However, there are a lot of people that go to these protests just for the adrenalin – there were a lot of ultras who were provoking the police. The media reported about injured people. You can’t expect anything else when you are trowing  something at an innocent policeman, can you? (Speaking of the police: in the beginning of the protests in the city of Varna a lot of policemen joined the protesters, although they were supposed just to guard them.)
• Today a group of people from the ski resort Bansko were transported to Sofia to show their support for Boyko. Many of them don’t understand what exactly is going on (it’s not a surprise, having in mind that no one knows), but they “skipped work” and “haven’t slept, in order to think about the situation.” Many had developed their own ideas how to exit the crisis. And this is what worried me! The ideas were ridiculous! At first I thought they were joking, but then I realized they weren’t. One wanted a famous showman – Slavi Trifonov, for a PM; another explained his plan: “Put everybody who has been in the government since 1989 in jail and make them pay some billions to the state.” Really? I am sad to see that there are so many people who want a change, but have no clue how it could be achieved.

Many people in the social media are ready to “sacrifice” themselves and stand in the elections. That might be seen as a good example for how engaged with politics Bulgarians are, provided we didn’t know that most of them are just joking and from those who are serious we can again see two groups: the ones with ideas close to “Let’s-put-everyone-in-jail!” and the ones who are abroad.

Boyko Borisov himself is constantly speaking about how corrupt the previous politicians were. Interestingly, for almost 4 years of his government, I haven’t seen him actually challenging any of them in court (correct me, if I’m wrong). I’m not defending the previous ones at all. I’m just wondering why didn’t he do anything, when he knows that they have made so many (maybe deliberate) mistakes?

And last, but not least, The Question: Why is he resigning? 

In order to answer it, it’s enough to sum up what I just wrote: in the beginning there were protests against him and now the protests are for him. Isn’t this great in a time when his rating has started to fall down? Even if he hadn’t resigned, in the summer we were supposed to have elections. So, yes, I believe it’s just an excellent PR-campaign and there is no need for anyone to cry : )