Comment by Emilia Milcheva:
Since the start of the election campaign on March 19, there has not been a day without signals of vote buying and police actions in areas with a chronically high risk of election violations. Acting Prime Minister Andrey Gyurov announced on Nova TV that entire polling stations are being bought. According to him, this battle will be won when on April 19 “citizens vote en masse, are calm and know that their vote will be counted and will carry weight”.
The new “offers”
And the vote traders are diversifying the “offers”. In addition to cash of 50-100 euros, the traditional food packages, debt relief from pawnshops and loan sharks, the arsenal now includes beauty services - cosmetic and hairdressing, and some clothes. It is not surprising that electrical appliances or a bottle of alcohol will also appear, and why not a visit to a fortune teller or astrologer, since more than half of Bulgarians, according to “Trend”, believe in magic and supernatural powers. Cash-and-carry democracy is flexible and adjusts to people's needs.
Vote buying thrives where the shadow economy has a significant share, institutions are weak, and addictions are everyday life. In addition to Bulgaria, it is “practiced” in Serbia, Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia. Globally, it is known in Africa and Asia, as well as in Latin American countries, and researchers define it as characteristic of “emerging democracies”. A 2023 study in the journal ScienceDirect revealed that an average of 17.73% of respondents in 17 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa received an offer of an electoral “gift“ (goods or money) in exchange for their vote in the last election. In 20 countries in Latin America, this share is 12.3%.
The difficult fight against addictions
In Bulgaria, there is a lack of in-depth studies that would show whether a bought or controlled vote has a stronger influence on the election result, especially among various vulnerable groups. Preventive actions by the Ministry of Internal Affairs limit the scale of the bought vote - they intimidate buyers or detain middlemen from the low levels of the schemes. However, controlled voting, in which employers or local authorities exert pressure on employees to vote for a particular party, is difficult to detect and counteract.
The presence of increased voter turnout can invalidate these manipulations. But ending election fraud is associated with much deeper reforms in the prosecutor's office, institutions and the financial system. Because the state, through its law enforcement agencies, is fighting not against structural problems, but against their recurrence. And these battles depend solely on the political will of individual caretaker governments.
Interior Minister Emil Dechev and Acting Secretary General of the Ministry of Interior Georgi Kandev are leading actions and reporting dozens of arrests and pre-trial proceedings. The schemes involve various individuals, both known and unknown, such as the hodja Airi Murad from the Roma quarter of Stolipinovo in Plovdiv, who is also a funeral director, the head of the post office in the Kardzhali region Samet Hasan, loan sharks, criminals, and others. According to the Bulgarian National Radio, Social Minister Hasan Ademov announced that the social system has been used over the years for controlled, and in some cases for corporate voting, given the connections between local authorities and/or local authorities and heads of social services.
The signals are 500-600% higher than the last elections in October 2024, the Minister of the Interior recently stated. The Ministry of Interior is working on 383 reports of election crimes, while in 2024 there were 52 for the same period. But then the materials end up in the prosecutor's office and sink there without consequences for the dealers, and they do not reach the final buyers at all.
Vote buying - in the gray area
What do the Ministry of Interior's actions actually reveal? Not just individual violations, but an entire system - a well-oiled machine for trading votes. Intermediaries, acting in the interests of political buyers, "shop" for voters through services in the gray economy. Vulnerable minority groups, but also marginalized Bulgarian communities, fall into the trap.
And here comes the uncomfortable question: do the grocers and beauty salons through which this scheme goes pay taxes, or do they hide income? The reality is that a significant portion of people in these communities are forced to survive in the informal sector, often without education and without opportunities to leave it.
This is a vicious circle of inequalities that the state conveniently ignores. And political leaders who loudly promise to fight these problems do not go beyond words. The frequent actions of police and gendarmerie in the Kardzhali region demonstrate that the state has not abdicated from where a party led by an oligarch has decided to build a fortress. The mayors of the seven municipalities in the region, headed by Erol Mumun - of Kardzhali, have declared allegiance to the leader of the MRF-NN - the oligarch and sanctioned for corruption by the US and Britain Delyan Peevski.
The fight against attempts to buy and control the vote not only in Kardzhali, but also in Northwestern Bulgaria and in other places where risky sections have been identified over the years, is important. Thus, the caretaker government shows that it is not subject to certain dependencies, and also that it is not afraid. These are signals that voters rely on. The ninth MIR-Kardzhali provides five seats in parliament, while in the previous elections in October 2024, MRF-NN and APS took two each, and “Velicie” took the fifth from MECH, after the Constitutional Court partially invalidated the vote. For Peevski, it is important to return the glory from the times when MRF took all five seats from Kardzhali. He is unlikely to succeed.
Pork barrel or buying with public funds
But buying votes does not end with money for a manicure, a bag of products and/or social benefits. The expression “pork barrel” in the US is a metaphor for directing state funds to local projects, with the aim of supporting a specific representative or party. (Pork barrel was the name given to the barrel of salted pork from which slaves were fed.)
The practice of distributing public funds in order for a specific party to receive support has been imposed for many years in Bulgaria. How many first steps have been taken in local elections, how many promises have been made... Project stadiums, project roads, project landfills appear in election campaigns and disappear after them, budgets "targeted" to convenient areas, and investments that follow not needs, but political geography. Thus, public resources become an instrument of influence, and do not solve real problems.
It is no secret that the Investment Program for Municipal Projects is such an instrument. An analysis by “Capital” revealed that 20 of the 40 municipalities that received all or almost all of the money requested by the MRDPW under this program are governed by mayors from the MRF. In the government that resigned, Ivan Ivanov, who was elected by the BSP, headed the regional ministry.
The fight against the bought vote does not go through battles, but through reforms of the systems and cleansing of institutions. Today the Ministry of Interior catches the intermediaries, tomorrow another Ministry of Interior will spread an umbrella over the schemes. And someone will stir in the barrel of pork with impunity.