"Stable Bulgaria in a secure Europe". This is the motto chosen for the European and national elections on June 9, 2024 by the campaign team of GERB ("Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria", populist right) - the party that, with the exception of two brief interruptions, presided over the country's destiny since 2009. Rarely has the gulf between political discourse and lived life been so striking. This is what Nadej Ragaru, historian and political scientist, professor at the University of Political Sciences (Sciences Po, Paris) wrote in a material for the online publication The Conversation.
In an economically dual and geopolitically divided society, if it were possible to define a common aspiration, it would be the aspiration for change. Despite all the mixed feelings, Bulgarian citizens still dream - without believing in it - of a country without collusion between political, business and judicial circles and emancipated from the influence of the oligarchs on the economy and the media. A country whose daily life will not be marred by public scandals, government crises and returns to the polls. After the failure in March 2024 of the agreement concluded in June 2023 between the center-right reformers PP-DB and the coalition GERB-SDS, the head of state Rumen Radev appointed an interim cabinet to prepare the organization of early parliamentary elections, which are to be held on the same day as the European elections. This will be the sixth election in three years. Since April 2021, the country has gone through seven governments, most of them caretaker, appointed by the president. How to get out of the crisis that began in June 2020 with the disclosure of alleged cases of corruption at the top of the state? Repetitive to the point of absurdity, are elections still able to produce the collective will, stable majorities and political legitimacy essential to the implementation of reforms in the justice, anti-corruption and competition sectors, the delay of which is hampering economic growth and collapse public trust? It is not certain that June 9 will provide encouraging answers to these questions: an anemic turnout rate, electoral fraud and the return to power of parties embodying the conquest of the state are among the expectations of local observers with a kind of bonus - the consolidation of Russophile groups and the xenophobic far right. While the anti-corruption measures adopted by the reformist government of Kiril Petkov (PP-DB, December 2021-August 2022) and the PP-DB/GERB-SDS coalition led by Nikolay Denkov (June 2023-April 2024 ), have been subjected to a detailed unraveling since the appointment of a cabinet of experts in April, the election campaign has witnessed a series of kompromats (public disclosure of compromising information), which are mainly aimed at the PP-DB reformers. Apart from the oligarchs, the main beneficiary of this harmful climate may be Vladimir Putin's Russia. The Russian "big brother" is also suspected of contributing to the weakening of the country, which has tried to defend EU policy in Ukraine. Far from exceptional, the Bulgarian trajectory is interesting in that it reveals the mechanisms of the disintegration of democracy operating today in several European countries (destruction of the legibility of divisions and the stability of party structures; collusion between business and politics; foreign influences, etc. .n.). Clientelism and the paralysis of justice are combined with the promotion of populist figures, often ephemeral, the reassertion of national pride, partly xenophobic, and the emergence of political forces that tirelessly sing about the decline of Europe and the search for strong alternatives.
Affairs bordering on fiction
Without a doubt, Hollywood screenwriters in need of inspiration should find creative resources in Bulgaria. Figures in muscle-packed tracksuits and suits abound; spectacular revelations and unexpected deaths too. As proof: in June 2020, at the end of a decade in which he had built his popularity on the promise of breaking up organized crime networks and a strong Bulgaria, former bodyguard, private security chief and prime minister Boyko Borisov - or someone who very looks like him - was photographed in his bedroom with a gun on his bedside table and an open drawer with wads of €500 notes and gold bars worth several million euros. According to Borisov, the fake photos were taken by a drone of the head of state, who later confirmed the possession of the drone, but not the infiltration of his home. A few days earlier, a recording of a voice similar to that of the prime minister, who in a flowery speech discussed business and politics, siphoning off European funds and broken political careers, circulated on social networks. These kompromats led in the summer of 2020 to the largest social mobilizations that Bulgaria has seen since 1997. In vain. In April 2021, a series of inconclusive early elections began in the country. Another illustration: Once upon a time there was a gambling boss named Vasil Bozhkov, who was suspected of not paying about 500 million BGN (about half in euros) in taxes. Having fled to Dubai in 2020, he declared that he had paid around 32 million euros over three years to several senior political officials, including Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and Finance Minister Vladislav Goranov, in exchange for the smooth running of his business. The prosecutor's office has been notified. In December 2023, the procedure was terminated for lack of evidence: the withdrawals were indeed confirmed; their use has not been proven. In May 2024, the former gambling boss announced his entry into politics and his candidacy for parliament. Death. It happens to everyone sooner or later, of course; accidental or not, who could argue that? As the judicial reform debate took shape in 2023, two individuals suspected of serving as brokers for "streamlining" of the functioning of the judicial system (read: completion of preliminary investigations and/or selective sanction of criminal acts), were killed in August 2023 and February 2024 respectively. Bulgaria had just adopted a constitutional reform in December 2023. , paving the way for a sweeping restructuring of the judiciary. A law was to be voted on in the spring. The fall of the government decided otherwise. How can we connect these scattered facts? First through the study of the (de)structuring of the political field and then through the complex relations with Russia.
Fragmented political spectrum
Three stories can be offered about political life in Bulgaria. First narrative: this is the narrative of a continuity articulated since 2009 around GERB, a right-wing formation officially pro-Western but rapidly pandering to Russia's economic interests (in energy, among other things). Boyko Borisov's party managed to weave a network of MPs/businessmen from the central to the municipal level and conclude post-election alliances (official or informal) that are very sensitive to the economic situation. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), created after 1989 to represent the Turkish and Muslim minorities known to be linked to powerful economic interests and former communist intelligence services, is now among his close associates. Second narrative : this is a narrative of a party system where the structuring division between anti- and ex-communists of the 1990s would have eroded in the run-up to EU accession (2007). After the disappearance of this framework, political actors survived at the cost of shifting loyalties, of ideologically elastic coalitions (between the former Tsar Simeon of Saxe-Coburg, the post-communist socialists and the DPS from 2005 to 2009, for example) and/or unification around populists (the showman Slavi Trifonov, in 2021-2022; the radical pro-Russian nationalist Kostadin Kostadinov, from 2021). Third narrative: the structurally pro-Western Bulgarian reformist political forces, whose latest emanation "We continue the change" (PP) was founded in September 2021 by Harvard-educated former ministers Kiril Petkov and Asen Vassilev will not have a sufficient electoral base to face competition from a weakened socialist party (left), radical pro-Russian nationalist organizations (right ) and groups dependent on oligarchs (elsewhere). In fact, each of these sketches captures part of the logic operating in Bulgaria. It remains to be seen why voters cannot trust one party to carry out the reforms they seek. Let us immediately rule out an exotic hypothesis: alienated from social networks, deprived of reflexivity and disillusioned, citizens would blindly vote for the powerful of the day, the populists, whose promises bind - the formula is known - only those who believe them. If the concentration of the media in the hands of a few tycoons has undoubtedly contributed to the deterioration of democratic debate, this reading framework is, to say the least, incomplete. Undoubtedly, it is better to look for explanations in the clientelistic influence on the territories, in the political events that regularly shift the political maps and in the intra-Bulgarian geopolitical division. For 12 years, GERB has controlled large regional centers and most municipalities. In the October-November 2023 local elections, although several districts left its field, Borissov's party remained dominant. In a configuration where access to public markets, state subsidies, European funds, public jobs and social services is likely to depend on the loyalty shown to those in power, elections are less about a preference vote or an "information deficit" rather than survival strategies. Not voting remains the only possible audacity. A similar logic applies to the southern and northeastern regions with a strong minority presence, which the DPS has ruled continuously since 1989. In February 2024, Delyan Peevski, a politician banned from entering America under the Magnitsky Act, assumed the party's co-chairmanship. A source of inconsistency in Bulgarian public policies, the cascade of governments is a result of and contributes to the continuous emergence of new protest groups whose leaders promote their profile as anti-corruption knights. Even when the latter gather few votes (4-5% of the electorate) in a relatively short period (one or two mandates), they contribute to the disintegration of the political game and prevent the formation of post-election coalitions with a technocratic profile.
Finally, and this point has become key in recent years, Bulgaria is deeply divided between an educated, urban and young minority defending a pro-Western line, and a majority attached to a pro-Russian vision of the conflict in Ukraine and Bulgaria's interests. The profile of pro-Russian voters ranges from nostalgic for the communist past to sympathizers of the ultra-nationalist "Vazrazhdane" party, including citizens who resent media claims that staying loyal to Russia is likely to guarantee low energy prices. The members of this caucus have one thing in common: they will not vote for reformers perceived as pro-American. Thus, the struggle against the capture of the state turns out to be hostage to the discrediting in public opinion of the pro-Western reading of the current challenges. In part, the latter is the work of the extremely effective policy of Russian influence.
Strategy of Russian influence: the war in Ukraine as an accelerator of the collapse of Bulgaria
The first reports that Russia has deployed an influence policy involving cultural soft power, support for certain journalists, intellectuals and academics (paid?), little transparent economic lobbying and discreet funding of political groups date back to 2013-2014. Not that Russia has ever been absent from strategic sectors such as energy, which provided Bulgaria with most of its gas and oil supplies until the invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Those with longer memories recall that over the assassination of former Socialist Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov in October 1996 raised doubts that it was related to the latter's role as an intermediary in the gas sector. The elimination in 2003 of one of the big bosses of the Bulgarian organized crime networks, Iliya Pavlov, would also have been facilitated by his ambitions in the hot energy sector.
The policy of Russian influence, however, took on an unprecedented scale after the invasion of Ukraine. While the EU passed several sanctions packages against Moscow, the war highlighted internal Bulgarian rifts, with the socialist president and the far-right adopting a discourse of peace with many Russophile undertones. As a result of the conflict, the number of pro-Russian websites (with trolls and fake news) has grown exponentially. If Bulgaria, while publicly noting its reluctance to export arms to Ukraine after the fall of the Petkov government in June 2022, organized valuable supplies (direct or indirect), the adoption of European sanctions also caused classic effects: it created networks of actors who are experts in circumventing them, strengthening illegal economic transactions. Moreover, in the field of energy, Petkov's government was too short-lived to complete the gas interconnection with Greece (in October 2022), the signing of a gas contract with Azerbaijan (planned a few days after the fall of the cabinet) and the plan to purchase of LNG from the US to allow Bulgaria to emancipate itself from Russia. On January 3, 2023, the public company Bulgargaz and its Turkish partner Botash entered into a thirteen-year supply agreement through the TurkStream gas pipeline. The agreement was presented by the (new) Bulgarian cabinet as a step forward on the path to diversification of the country's supplies. According to the terms of the agreement, however, the Bulgarian side does not control the origin of the gas (actually Russian). It also committed to paying $2 billion over 13 years regardless of deliveries. Following the disclosure of this data by an investigative site, the Bulgarian parliament had to request a renegotiation of the contract on April 19, 2024. It is unlikely that the June 9 elections will allow us to escape from this square of the circle: faced with oligarchs who are believed to that they control part of the political class and "external patrons" who take advantage of the lack of transparency of Bulgarian institutions to advance their interests. Voters are very likely to opt out, even if it means allowing well-known shady and not-so-good figures to return to power. Is it possible that European politicians have forgotten that the territory of Bulgaria, a member of the EU, borders the extremely strategic Black Sea?