Comment by Ivaylo Noyzi Tsvetkov:
I generally sleep relatively well, but sometimes I am startled by a huge and essential cultural fear about the entire situation in today's Bulgaria - that the supposedly Armageddon battle for the rule of law, the rule of law and especially the fight against corruption between the few reformers and the entrenched status quo is not just turning into a separate type of permanent status quo, but also that it rests on an essentially flawed argument or a vague raison d'être (reason for its existence).
Why do reformers in Bulgaria still fail
And this flawed argument is the following: why do we assume that the majority of Bulgarians today want a rule of law? Or a war on corruption? Here I immediately recall that semi-aphorism about our existence - that corruption is any scam in which I do not participate (and some others, the few, benefit). Ergo, here we must also look for the basic reason why the reformers for these three decades have failed in many things, including communication - to establish the feeling that: a) without a functioning rule of law there is no prosperity (or a social state, which in my opinion should be the new national-cultural “project”) and b) everything that the notorious average Bulgarian is not satisfied with can be relatively easily traced back to corruption - from small personal to large state.
Of course, with the proviso that there is no such animal as an “average Bulgarian” - there are a hundred types of Bulgarians, generational, economic and all sorts. But still, let me remind you, social anthropology is obliged a priori to seek the “least common multiple” at any given moment, and in this sense the current result is important – and it, in general, and despite certain achievements such as a new stratification, including an already stratified middle class, does not make us particularly happy.
I did my own little field research, including outside Sofia, and in Northern Greece – mainly on the above issues of the rule of law and the notorious battle with corruption (the latter, by the way, resembles a mega-cynical and somewhat ironic headline from the “New York Post“ from the 1980s &ndquo; &ndquo;Drugs Win Drug War“, i.e. drugs win the war on drugs). The conclusions are not particularly encouraging, but I was impressed by the opinion of some young Greeks, mainly employed in the IT business – they didn't even understand what the problem was with the lack of a rule of law, although I explained in two languages. For them, note, the Greek judicial system is ruthless, even an idea more ruthless than the generally accepted democratic principles dictate (hence the ancient Greek epithet that you hold your life in your own hands).
Yes, there is corruption elsewhere, but it is not a way of life there
That is, they talk about the almost absolute inevitability of judgments, be they civil or criminal; accordingly, they somehow know and live in an environment and a state that has managed to convince them that the law works. Unlike the few young Bulgarians from this experiment, some of them from the “white ghetto“, according to whom everything in our country can drag on for years through the courts, and for certain people close to power there may be loopholes through which they can sneak in with the appropriate legal assistance (“if you have money for a good lawyer etc.“). There was no mention of the speedy justice, somewhat achieved in other countries.
That is why the question arises for me “do we really want a state governed by the rule of law“ – because it seems that in our mental software, “added“ by a series of politicians with no respect for the rules themselves, the quasi-apathetic concept of “illegality” is embedded, although there is no such word. And I already hear the comments that in Greece, and in the countries of Central Europe that have far surpassed us, there was also corruption: of course there is. It's just not a way of life in these countries.
This sounded like a cliché, but I won't stop there. Our own country today seems to be working on several levels - one is to take over ever larger parts of life and present them through the helpful media as successes, but the second, more important, is that it, intentionally or not, desensitizes its citizens on the above issues and increasingly turns them into subjects, especially when it crushes private business (while it itself does a huge private business through its leaders).
The only way out
And I don't find any other option than the one that has already been discussed - that generation Z (and after it, Alpha) is our only chance to get out of this quiet, belated cognitive tribe and, above all, from the corrupt thinking that can be easily traced back to the late socialist era, the services, etc. Just take the Supreme Judicial Council - a neo-communist-type body entrenched within itself, which seems to tell you “we decide how things will go, we vote for our own salaries, you can't bully us, protest, don't interfere with us“.
Finally: the possible replacement of the acting Prosecutor General will not lead to anything, just as the half-baked and partially repealed reforms by the Constitutional Court recently led to nothing. The only way to get to something is to somehow agree as a community that only the “Clistenians” measures in justice would lead to at least some positive result. And do we really want them? And who would be Cleisthenes*?
*Clisthenes was an ancient Greek politician from Athens who carried out key reforms around 508 – 507 BC, laying the foundations of Athenian democracy. His most significant reform shifted the center of power and responsibility from family ties to citizenship.