They do not draw horizons of social development and do not have a clear picture of their own future. They usually do not vote, and if they do, they bet on a different party each time. They are the "swamp", writes Evgeniy Dainov.
Asked by a young journalist what the most important thing that determines politics is, the legendary British Prime Minister of the 1950s, Harold Macmillan, replied with his no less legendary line: "Events, my boy, events".
An event becomes an event when, after its occurrence, what was true about politics before it is no longer true. The entire political landscape has changed and requires a new perspective, new analyses and new practices. Whoever has not understood that everything is different is doomed to fail - to sink into some quagmire that has appeared in the new landscape.
They are trying to convince us that nothing happened
The protests in our country at the end of last year were undoubtedly an event. Everything after that event was already different. But enormous efforts are being made to convince the public that nothing happened. The talking heads in the media prophesy "the same parliament" after the elections, since nothing - according to them - has changed. And the sociological surveys produce snapshots that in no way reflect that there was an event equal in scale to February 4, 1997.
We have long been aware of the talking heads. Their mission is to deprive everything of meaning and thus discourage people from voting, so that the protesters call the “pigs” remain in power. The problem with sociology and political science is not just that some money has changed hands. There are real, fundamental defects here that actively prevent conscientious analysts from taking into account the effect of events. These defects are found in three interconnected layers of consciousness, private and public: folk psychology; political science; sociology.
A characteristic feature of Bulgarian folk psychology is the fear of achievements, which leads to the inability to recognize and appreciate achievements, when there are any. In this mental world, everything that happens is a repetition of something already seen; and nothing new and nothing important can happen.
A direct result of this profound, not always conscious attitude is the overwhelming reasoning that the protests of 2025 are a direct repetition of those of 2020 and 2013. And, therefore, we now know what is going to happen in the future: some kind of assembly and nothing special.
The squeezing of the new and unknown into the mold of the old and familiar (non-disturbing) is a character trait inherited from the pre-modern, agrarian past. Between this trait, however, and the numerical data of yet another sociological study lie serious worldview errors in both the field of political science and political sociology.
The error in the field of political science was in a certain sense inevitable, since it is not only ours, but is a long-standing global delusion. Classical (American) political science was formed in the mid-1970s, when everyone lived with the feeling that time had stopped. Whatever was supposed to happen – has already happened; there is nothing else left to happen. In this stopped time, politics, and the social structure as a whole, is understood as a mechanism anchored in one place, rotating – something like Ptolemy's models of the mechanical universe with the Earth at its center. The mechanism rotates, a kind of even rumble is heard, and only from time to time a component is moved and another component from the already existing ones comes in its place. Nothing new appears and the whole system goes nowhere.
But time never stops; and that is why mechanical metaphors and models do not work either for society and politics, or for astronomy, or for man as such. Not to mention that – but read this Weber, people! – politics is made by living organisms endowed with reason and emotions, not by mechanical devices with preset programs.
People, the universe, society, politics are not mechanisms. They are processes. They flow like rivers and are constantly changing: one thing was five minutes ago, another will be in another five. Being a politician or even just a political scientist means being able to swim down the river like Huck Finn, swimming his raft down the Mississippi River. You are in constant motion and there is no way, approaching a bend, to say to yourself: “Ah, I have seen such bends and I know how to deal with them!“. Such an attitude is the surest recipe for drowning in the inexorable reality of the river. Because: every bend is new and unknown, even if you passed it yesterday, before the rain. What you can do is to build on your experience of previous bends, but to appreciate the novelty of the upcoming one and respect its power.
Conclusion: if today, after the event of 2025, you are a politician or political scientist who acts on the principle that he has already seen this in 2013 and 2020, you will fail. You will drown in the turbulent waters of reality, while from now on you are calculating on your fingers what assemblies to make after the elections. The way not to drown is to fully appreciate what the protests have changed and to look for ways to direct this change, this drive, in a useful direction.
We chose the wrong model
This is the situation with political science. The situation is similar with political sociology: when it was time to choose, we chose not the dynamic, but the static model. And we locked ourselves in a model of a world in which there are no changes and everything is known before it happens. We chose the wrong model – the Anglo-American one, instead of the more applicable French one for us. Instead of Raymond Aron and Alain Lanslot, we chose Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens.
Anglo-American political sociology was created to help navigate a situation that is almost completely different from the European one. In both England and America, there were elections before there were parties. Individuals were elected to represent a specific geographical region. The parties that emerged later now represent larger ideological and value groups spread throughout society. However, the principle of “one constituency - one representative” remains, which stabilizes a two-party system with parties that are 150-200 years old.
In Europe, elections come with parties, the proportional system and party volatility. Old parties are constantly dying and new ones are being born, running to represent the ideological and value groups in society.
The political sociologies born in these different conditions aim to understand what is happening. In England and America, the relative weight, at the moment, of one of the two historical parties is measured. This is where the categorizations we are used to come from: “cores“, “peripheries“, “hesitants“, “non-voters“ come from. The pulsation – expansion-contraction-new expansion – of the parties and their influence is measured, not of the groups they represent.
French political sociology, on the contrary, measures the state of the groups. The reason is that here in Europe, socio-political groups are more durable than the political parties that represent them. The opposite is true in the Anglo-American reality. There, parties are constant, but groups change. In England, for example, the liberals initially represented the large landowners, but with the emergence of the middle class, they positioned themselves as its representatives, leaving the large landowners to the conservatives. And the conservatives, who started out as implacable opponents of big industry, quickly reoriented themselves and became representatives of the large industrialists.
The constant is not the groups seeking representation, but the parties seeking an electorate. Hence all the reasoning about cores, peripheries, and the like. However, in Europe this reveals nothing; on the contrary, it becomes a veil that conceals reality. For decades, in our country, people have been thinking about the hard cores of the UDF, BSP, DPS, if you will, and even the obviously ephemeral NMSV. And? Where are these cores? If they are cores, they should remain constant, and the periphery should pulsate? Where is the core of GERB in Pazardzhik, where Boris's party, which ruled the country for half a generation, remained in fourth place, after the unknown Svoboda party?
With us, in Europe, social groups are a constant; what changes are the parties that represent them. That is why the French tradition measures not the parties, but the groups. And it presents the following picture: in society there are “active minorities“ and between them – “swamp“.
Who are the “swamp“?
We immediately begin to see more clearly what kind of country we live in. In our country, we have two main active minorities: a slowly growing group of people who want to live like Europeans, forming perhaps about 38 percent of the population; and a rapidly decreasing group, people who want to live like Russians, numbering about 13 percent of the population.
These groups know what they want and pull the others in the appropriate direction. The parties that represent them are not the same over time. In the European field, it was the UDF, the Reformist Bloc, and today they are different. In the pro-Russian field, it was the BSP, Ataka, NFSD, VMRO, and today they are different.
Among the active minorities, the “swamp” is quietly bubbling. These are people who do not draw horizons of social development and do not have a clear picture of their own future. They do not vote, and if they vote, they “throw“ for a different party every time.
What, in this model, are the tasks of the parties representing the active minorities? To mobilize the entire minority. And to give it such momentum that the "swamp" will say to itself: "Ah, these will probably be the new strong ones"" This is important, since the "swamp", no matter how inert, at crucial moments knows how to orient itself where the power is – and votes in such a way as to cling to this power.
This strategy stems from the application of the French model and offers a way not to lose that Event, which was the December protests. The application of the English model will lock the parties in the endless search for ways to "activate" the periphery while "holding" the core. This leads to mouse-sucking. Applying the French model, on the other hand, leads to a muscular, confident, attractive campaign that will attract enough people from the "swamp".
This, by the way, has already been done – by the PP, when they were young and did not listen to sociologists. Kiril Petkov's government was the result of the fact that part of the "swamp" saw in the "Kirchovites" the new force and stuck to it. For the upcoming elections, it is important that the "genzites" who invaded with their unique energy are convinced to vote as they protested – and to achieve, already on the electoral terrain, that all-changing Event that they already achieved on the terrain of the civil uprising.
* This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State Gazette as a whole.