Politics in our country has long since become a dirty word. Ask a random person on the street and you will probably hear a long list of reasons to reject politicians, parties and everything associated with them. But if so many people are disgusted by politics, and those who are still interested in it stop talking to one another, what is actually happening to our society?
The label comes before the conversation, making it impossible
Look at how many issues divide us today - the war in Ukraine, the euro, the European Union, religion in schools, social benefits, the Cyrillic alphabet, retail chains. The list is endless.
Different positions on these issues are perfectly natural. The problem lies elsewhere: increasingly, we are not arguing with the other person's arguments, but with the image we have formed of them in advance. If you support one position, that means you are uneducated, stupid or misled. If you support the other, you are a traitor, a renegade or a warmonger. The label comes before the conversation. And increasingly, it replaces it altogether. This has long since gone beyond the bounds of politics.
We all know families in which politics has long been banned from the dinner table because the last attempt at dialogue ended in a scandal. Friends who have stopped speaking to one another because of election ballots. Neighbours who look at each other with suspicion because they know who voted for whom. Increasingly, we limit our social circles to people whose views mirror our own. That makes us feel more at ease. We do not get angry, we do not argue and we never question our own convictions.
But in this way, we gradually lose the ability to hear opinions different from our own. And over time, the desire to understand them at all.
Legitimising hatred instead of extending a hand
Political parties actively participate in this process. Under pressure from their most radical supporters, they increasingly speak in ways that reinforce hatred among their own followers instead of winning the trust of everyone else.
Social media has further accelerated this toxicity - outrage, attacks and categorical judgments are given a platform there, while calm reasoning sinks without a trace. Propaganda and organised disinformation campaigns take advantage of precisely this fracture.
A vicious circle emerges. Political confrontation intensifies, the loudest voices begin to set the tone, and the majority of people simply withdraw into apathy.
Let us not forget why democracy exists
When fewer than a third of voters cast ballots in a runoff or parliamentary election, this does not simply mean indifference. The figure is a warning. If public attention is focused almost entirely on the war between the most active party activists, where does that leave everyone else? And how do we convince them that politics has a direct bearing on their lives?
Here we reach the essential flaw. We are beginning to forget what democracy actually exists for - that democracy and freedom for which our ancestors and parents fought. Its purpose was never to make people the same or to eliminate the differences between them. Quite the opposite. Democracy exists precisely because these differences are inevitable - we have different values, interests, convictions and ideas about justice. Its great civilisational breakthrough is that it allows us to turn the clash between them into a peaceful institutional process, rather than a battle for the physical or moral destruction of the opponent.
We can have elections, parties, a parliament and formally guaranteed rights. But if we stop accepting political difference as something natural and legitimate, we lose the democratic culture itself, without which these institutions become hollow shells.
Disagreement cannot lead to denying someone's humanity
There is a dangerous line that we are crossing with increasing frequency: when disagreement with someone's position grows into a complete denial of the person themselves.
Our political views are part of us, but they do not define our entire human identity. Party affiliation, an opinion on a particular public issue or the choice of whom to vote for cannot be the sole criterion by which we judge someone's intelligence, morality or human worth. We may be convinced that the other person is wrong. We may categorically oppose their ideas. But that does not mean we have to despise them. Respect is not agreement, nor does it mean that all opinions are equally true. There are principles on which we must not compromise - human rights, the rejection of violence, and the freedom and dignity of every citizen. But it is precisely these principles that should allow us to argue without denying one another.
If we set our political passions aside for a moment, we will discover that we have far more in common than we suppose. We all want Bulgaria to be a good and safe common home. We want to live in peace, to be healthy, to have decent incomes, our children to receive a quality education and our parents to enjoy a dignified old age. We want functioning institutions, an economy that creates prosperity, healthcare that heals and a state that protects its citizens.
Of course we will argue about how to achieve this - what taxes to pay, how public funds should be distributed and what our foreign policy should be. And we should argue. Because it is precisely through this clash that workable solutions are born. But how can we find them if we have already decided that the other side does not deserve to be heard at all?
We do not have to think alike, but we must be able to live together
It is time to remind ourselves of one simple principle: democracy does not require us to think alike. It requires us to be able to live together even though we think differently.
It requires us to accept that the person across from us does not cease to be our fellow citizen when they cease to be our ally. That the freedom to have our own opinion goes hand in hand with the humility to acknowledge that the other person may have reasons of their own. That political victory does not make us better people, just as defeat does not make others less worthy.
True democratic maturity is not measured by how passionately we defend those who think like us. It is revealed in the way we treat people with whom we profoundly disagree.
Because after the last vote has been counted, after victory and defeat, after all the arguments and accusations, we continue to live in the same country. Elections determine who will govern. They should not determine whether we can be a society.