Comment by Evgeniy Dainov:
How can you recognize countries where there is no democracy? By the fact that when a crisis occurs, citizens humble themselves, remain silent and wait for some leader to do something, and in the meantime they try not to draw attention to themselves, so as not to take it away. They know that power does not emanate from them.
How can you recognize countries where there is democracy? By the fact that citizens know that all power emanates from them – and that they give it temporarily to the rulers. And they take it back into their own hands when the rulers and their institutions refuse to do the work for which they are paid by the citizens.
Bulgarians did not sit around waiting for saviors "from above"
Where is Bulgaria? It is obvious that it is among the countries where there is democracy. Why? Because when the greedy people who got hold of power finally went wild, the citizens did not sit around waiting for saviors "from above". They took matters directly into their own hands and took back power.
When the mafia left Sofia without garbage collection, the intentions were clear: to milk the people of Sofia with huge sums of money, to demonstrate to them that nothing depends on them. That their job is to do their bit. But that did not happen. The citizens immediately organized themselves and started garbage collection and garbage disposal themselves – with their own hands, sacks, cars.
When the mafia was preparing - publicly, without hiding - to steal the local elections in Pazardzhik, its goal was the same: not only to show the citizens that the power is in them, but also to demonstrate that from now on only naked force will play a role. There are no rules, no laws, no - restrictions. They do what the next greedy person wants.
But here too, the expected did not happen. Citizens from all over the country mobilized to control the shenanigans surrounding these elections. They poured into the scene, documented everything - despite the shameful statement of BNT and subsequently the Ministry of Internal Affairs that there were no violations. They even exercised – citizen's arrest – on vote buyers. They even made the police, with their monstrous salaries, imitate, for a few documented minutes, that they were working to maintain order and the law. And finally, it was taken away by a guy with a nickname who was acting as a local police chief.
Politicians must speak to the people
Of course, we citizens cannot do the work of the institutions all the time. We are busy. That is why we have created a state that we can support, that is why we have transferred our power to some people - they should deal with common affairs, while we make their salaries.
That is why, when we regain power, we cannot hold it forever. We must cede it to some politicians who will exercise it in the interest of our common good. And here, politicians, who still represent the public interest, still do not know exactly how to behave in order to be truly useful among the pack of thieves stuck in the institutions of government.
However, when politicians contact the excited citizenry, then the whole situation changes. What prevents, for example, the mayor of Sofia in this extraordinary situation of civic mobilization from speaking to his voters live via the Internet every night? To explain what the problems are, what has been done to overcome them and what is ahead? Volodymyr Zelensky has been doing this - every night! - with his people since the very beginning of the war. And thus he maintains the will of Ukrainian citizens to continue resisting the aggression of the Russians (angry and noisy). What prevents the heads of the PP-DB parliamentary group from speaking to us at least at the end of every week - to explain what is happening, where the problem is, what they are doing and what we can do to help?
What is hindering is what has always limited the effectiveness of our democratic politicians: ignorance of their people, bordering on fear of them. The only cure is constant communication with these people, in their natural environment - i.e. we are not talking about the propaganda tours undertaken that day by the GERB leadership.
While politicians in Bulgaria are crowding around, it turned out that we, Bulgarian citizens, still have access to an important political arena. In a few days, a discussion will be held in the European Parliament about the threatened Bulgarian democracy. And at the micro level, direct civil action continues. In the Krasno Selo region, even the threat of a boycott of a store that, in the midst of the garbage crisis, was demonstratively throwing away broken furniture and boards made the store take them back. It didn't even come to a boycott.
Let's remember Reagan's words
For many years now, there has been no talk of "left" and "right". It is, as Ronald Reagan said a generation ago, about "below" and "above". Above is the democratic, peaceful, and prosperous way of life, in which the representatives of the citizenry govern for the common good. "Below" is naked force, the greed for power, and the greed for resources. Today, not only in Bulgaria, this situation is extremely simplified into the following choice that we (and our representatives) are compelled to make every day: decency versus meanness, dignity versus corruption, civilization versus savagery.
The ideal situation would be to repeat the result of Pazardzhik on a national level: one major political force would be an obvious representative of savagery, and the other - of civilization. Thus personified, the choice would be clear and honest. And since, in addition to being a democracy, we are, for the most part, decent people (albeit with many irritating deficits), the chances of democratic politicians in such a situation can only improve.