President Rumen Radev is becoming increasingly helpless. With his behavior, he is positioning himself in a very narrow pro-Russian, Eurosceptic and populist spectrum. On top of that, he is left without allies. By Vesselin Stoynev.
President Rumen Radev's statement on his departure for Japan is practically an admission of the strategic futility he caused himself with his demand for a referendum on the euro. Because he is no longer only positioning himself as a key opponent of the completion of Bulgaria's European integration, but he has also deprived himself of the prospect of becoming an anti-corruption alternative to power with a broader denominator than the alternatives under party banners.
And through the Constitutional Court he cannot influence the eurozone
The president no longer has an institutional outlet for political expansion, except to remain in a trench defense of his referendum boundary. He is only using his remaining option to refer to the Constitutional Court the refusal of the Speaker of the Parliament Natalia Kiselova to allow the consideration of the referendum. But even if the Constitutional Court annuls her act, it will be weeks before the court makes a ruling and before, even if it obliges the parliament to consider the president's proposal, it will be brought into the chamber and voted on (despite the declared majority that it will be rejected). That is, This will not happen before June 4, when the convergence report will be announced, so that it can influence it, which was one of Radev's goals. If the referendum is ever voted on in the plenary hall, it will most likely not happen in the remaining month or so after that, when the EU Council will eventually make the final decision on our entry into the eurozone from January 1, 2026.
He is not looking for a debate, but is stoking fears
In his semi-official address, the president pathetically stated that "the path to the currency does not pass through the corpse of democracy" - with the unconvincing justification that the referendum is not against the euro, but aims to provoke a debate, because the initiative at 12 to five is precisely an attempt to handbrake the euro, and not a debate that actually began 20 years ago. With false concern, he made suggestions about an expected increase in prices, manipulatively referring to the experience of Croatia, without naming it, but did not say what he himself had done so far to convince people of the benefits of the euro, in which he himself believed until yesterday.
Radev raised the slogan that "solidarity is more important than currency" and declared himself almost the only remaining representative of the "poor, voiceless and dissenting". But he does not allow that our joining the eurozone could be precisely the path towards the poor and voiceless being less poor and more vocal, and hence more in agreement with the European future of the country – like many left-wing people, such as Krum Zarkov, Atanas Pekanov, Ivaylo Kalfin (some of whom were also his collaborators and associates). Instead, Radev prefers to keep the poor, the voiceless and the dissenters captive to their own fears, so that they remain as he describes them. The real debate about Bulgaria's European future, both before and after the eurozone, cannot fail to be within the traditional right-left political matrix. And this could be a debate about a flat or proportional tax, about regional disparities, about equal access to quality education and healthcare, about income and jobs in conditions of rapid high-tech transformations, etc., etc. But such a debate and battles can be led by responsible and systematic politicians, not those who descend the path of populism from the top of the highest bell tower of state power.
With the "Botas" affair the pro-Russian president is now also pro-Turkish
With the "Botaş" affair, for which he bears at least political responsibility because of the caretaker government he appointed that created it, the president is also losing points in the other electoral spectrum from which he had previously drawn support. With his pro-Russian positions and his campaign against the euro, he has abandoned those democratic and pro-European voters who voted for him in the presidential elections. He will lose them all if the affair turns out to be corruption, and not just the result of blatant incompetence. At the same time, however, he may also lose the sympathies of pro-Russian voters, because he has suddenly turned out to be a pro-Turkish president. Unlike the first voters, for whom there is no particular difference between pro-Russian and pro-Turkish, the second voters are dominated by the images of Russia as a liberator and Turkey as an enslaver.
A general left without officers
If Bulgarian political life in the last few years has been deeply divided along the axes of corruption-anticorruption and East-West, with his behavior Rumen Radev is positioning himself in a very narrow, pro-Russian, Eurosceptic and populist spectrum. On top of all that, he is left without allies who will be extremely necessary for him if he dares to enter the party-political arena at all. In addition to the above-mentioned, by appointing people close to him such as Ivo Hristov and Lazar Lazarov to the Commission for Protection from Discrimination, he shows that he has either been abandoned by others who prefer to employ them, or that he has taken care of them, because in any case he has no intention of giving up his presidential post early. It would also be unwise for him to leave "Dondukov" alone. 2 not only because he will not be able to put on the heroic mantle of the general who provoked and won a referendum and led the people somewhere, but also because he managed to divide too many people to be able to lead enough of them.
Kostadin Kostadinov will not accept Radev as his boss
Moreover, there are more than one or two generals and they are fighting fiercely in parliament, and he will have to be a hostage to their inevitably growing, by the very nature of populism, demands. Besides not having the experience and skills of Kostadin Kostadinov, who is unlikely to tolerate Radev's leadership in this field, the president has already proven that he has difficulty attracting and retaining allies.
So the president has no other horizon than to serve out his term in false talk about democracy, anti-corruption and sovereignty, without having the institutional levers and political prospects to be a serious alternative that could possibly reconfigure the political picture in the country.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the State News Agency as a whole.