12 November 2024
With everyone focused on the US election and is consequences, a good change of station might be a follow up on my article from late August concerning the electoral challenges plaguing Bulgaria. Bulgarians have just once again gone to the polls on Oct. 27, their seventh general election in just over three years in an attempt to break their ongoing political deadlock. Disappointingly the results have done nothing to resolve the ongoing problems and in fact things seem to be only getting worse.
The main driving force behind the snap election was President Rumen Radev’s refusal to approve the formation of a caretaker government to fill the void left after the inability of the centre-right GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria, Grazhdani za evropeysko razvitie na Bŭlgaria) to form a coalition Government following June’s election. This resulted from then interim Prime Minister Goritsa Grancharova-Kozhareva’s insistence on maintaining Kalin Stoyanov as Interior Minister. Stoyanov has faced criticisms for police violence during protests, however the main sticking point is that bulk of the Bulgarian Parliament alleges Stoyanov is working for Delyan Peevski a Bulgarian media tycoon and one of Bulgaria’s most powerful oligarchs who is under US and UK sanctions for corruption. This is a rather simplified run down, for a more complete explanation refer back to my previous article.
Delyan Peevski is an extremely divisive figure in Bulgarian politics, business and media who, it should be noted has previously served several terms of office in Bulgaria’s Parliament as an MP with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) MP. Most notably he has the dubious distinction of having served as head of the Bulgarian State Agency for National Security for a single day and after being forced to resign when mass protests erupted in response to his appointment. Peevski has become a central point in the ongoing Bulgarian election woes on several fronts.
The objections to any suggestion of Peevski having any further influence in parliament led in September to a major rift forming within the DPS, fracturing it into two coalitions after the controversial removal of Peevski as chairman. The one faction under Ahmed Demir Dogan, a Turkish-Bulgarian oligarch and politician who founded the party in 1990 DPS-Dogan and the other under Peevski the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – A New Beginning (DPS-Peevski) entered a heated legal dispute over the rightful heir to the DPS brand. This eventually saw Peevski prevail and DPS Dogan rebrand as Alliance for Rights and Freedoms (APS).
Another reason Peevski has become a sticking point in the ongoing political crisis concerns the latest election results. Following the October election, parliament remains fragment with no party holding a clear majority. The GERB won the largest vote share securing 25% of the vote and 69 of 240 seats in the National Assembly. GERB’s leader, former Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, has declared a willingness to cooperate with all parties except for Revival, provided they are willing to support GERB’s program. (I will explain Revival in a moment, bear with me)
This is significant on three points. The first being that it was allegations of corruption concerning Borisov’s Government coalition that precipitated this crisis in the first place back in 2020. Secondly, and perhaps most importantly it signals GERB may be willing to work with Peevski’s DPS which came in 4th place with 11% of the vote and 30 seats. This would be a rather controversial move which would put GERB (already unpopular with other parties) at odds with the second largest winners the reformist coalition We Continue the Change (PP) – Democratic Bulgaria (DB) which won nearly 14% of the vote and 37 seats. PP-DB has already called for a cordon sanitaire around DPS, urging all parties to sign an agreement to this effect with a commitment to supporting anti-corruption legislation and judicial reform.
On this last point, the success of Peevski’s DPS has become embroiled in a post-election scandal with a large percentage of their votes having come from districts where there were notable voting irregularities. This has led to widespread allegations of vote-buying against DPS, and Peevski personally, which has positioned Peevski with enough seats in parliament to play king-maker in a future coalition. Hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets of Sofia in protest of the scandal. Already, in response to public outrage, President Rumen Radev has called for an investigation into the allegations, which he described as “ugly practices” which does not look hopeful. Already it is being reported that an investigative journalist has allegedly come under threat from a provincial mayor close to Peevski for probing election fraud claim.
With the three-year, seven election cycle having been precipitated by protests over corruption, Bulgaria has not made much progress. Peevski’s close political and economic partnership with Borisov could all but guarantee a place in the future governing coalition, which would hold dire implications for domestic politics but also Bulgaria’s foreign relations. Indeed, the current Bulgarian government is so broken on this front that it stated it has no information on a deal reportedly being prepared by Russian oil company Lukoil for the sale of the Burgas oil refinery to a Qatari-British consortium, a strategic asset for the entire Balkan region that could hold major consequences for Bulgaria.
Bulgarians’ faith in their government and electoral processes is abysmal. Widespread allegations of corruption are a common component of most political discussions. Bulgaria remains one of the poorest and most corrupt nations in the EU, with most effort to combat corruption being stymied by a judiciary that is seen as often acting in the interest of the corrupt. There is a long history of voter apathy. Gallup two decades of monitoring distrust in elections across Europe has consistently placed Bulgaria at the bottom of the list. Voter confidence in the honesty of elections peaked at 36% in 2006 and has since dramatically declined to a record low of now 10% six times lower than the current EU average of 62%.
This distrust among Bulgarians extends beyond elections to encompass most public institutions. Confidence in the judiciary stands at a mere 17%, the same percentage of trust that is given the current caretaker government, according to a recent poll, conducted by bTV, a Bulgarian media group, and Market Links, a market and social research company. A survey carried out just days before the election places public trust in the Bulgarian Parliament at a only 6%. All of this is to say that there is a growing dissatisfaction amongst Bulgarians with a political system incapable of providing the country with basic governance or any semblance of stability. This dissatisfaction has fed voter apathy which in turn has led to low voter turnouts of 34% in June and 38% this October which only further fuel the cycle.
This situation has very real and serious consequences for Bulgaria’s future. The economy already damaged by COVID and war in Ukraine which has damaged foreign investment has taken a further hit and the country risks losing billions of euros in EU recovery funds due to the lack of ability to press forward with reforms. Full integration into the open-border Schengen area and joining the Eurozone are also under threat.
This brings us round to the aforementioned Revival. The populist pro-Russia party Vazrazhdane (Revival) party has made massive gains in Bulgaria thanks to the ongoing stalemate, managing third with 13% of the vote and 35 seats in this election. Revival has run on a platform of lifting sanctions on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine and ending aid to Kyiv, while also calling the country’s NATO membership into question. It also increased its popularity further in August after proposing a Russian-inspired law banning ‘LGBTQ propaganda’ that was passed by a large majority in parliament.
The instability Bulgaria has faced, the inability of the political class to do anything about it along with disinformation coming from Moscow, has only served to foster the popularity of pro-Russian and far-right groups in the former Soviet satellite state. With little hope of pulling out of the slide into political instability, voter fatigue and disillusionment with politicians has created a fertile environment for the far-right in the country. Radical political voices aided by Moscow’s widespread disinformation campaign is successfully undermining public support for democratic processes and bolstering the popularity of pro-Russian and far-right groups. As an indicator of this PP has lost ground with each new snap vote, while Revival, meanwhile, has gained voter support. Approval for the EU is now at an all-time low of 46% and Revival is demanding Bulgaria now hold a referendum on its membership in NATO.
Most startling when looking to October’s elections results is that some 30% of votes went to populist parties and around 21% to pro-Russian forces. Velichie (Greatness) another pro-Moscow party only just failed to reach the 4% threshold to enter parliament with 3.99%. They have officially announced that they do not recognize the finalised election results, and demand that the October elections be declared illegal due to alleged large scale irregularities and new elections to be held immediately. In another example of the Kremlin’s hydra-headed destabilisation efforts one of its other friendly parties (Velichie) is using the graft of another pro-Russian oligarch’s party DPS-Peevski to reject the democratic process and demand a new opportunity to increase the pro-Russian vote in the National assembly. Simultaneously the anti-Russian reformist coalition PP-DB is likewise demanding a full recount due to these same irregularities adding to the view that the democratic process can’t be relied upon in Bulgaria. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) an Armenian nationalist and socialist political party as well as the nationalist party Greatness, which missed the 4 per cent threshold needed to enter parliament by only 21 votes, are also disputing the results.
The chairwoman of Bulgaria’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has stated they cannot change the results of the recent parliamentary elections despite indisputable video evidence of manipulation. The result is that there is little hope of a stable government emerging from Bulgaria’s latest election and instead it’s likely that Sofia is about to explode if another election is not immediately called, fueling further fragmentation and polarisation.
If I might close by borrowing heavily something from the LSE’s European Institute, this situation is unfortunately not unique in Europe, only an extreme case. The trends underlying it are common across Europe as radical anti-establishment populist parties dominate elections where the voters are chiefly concerned with a rejection of the status quo, no longer seen as serving their interests. In addition to growing nationalism these divisions leave room for Russia to grow its influence over European politics with many of these outlying radical parties showing a very clear affinity for Putin’s Russia. This fragmentation, polarisation, nationalism, and Russian influence campaign poses the very real threat of creating the destabilisation the Kremlin has so long desired. Against this backdrop and multiple ongoing wars in the region, democratic decline and instability in EU member states undermines Europe’s ability to act on the global stage in the interests of its own security. We are losing in Bulgaria in what is yet another front in Moscow’s continued hybrid war against the West, a reality we refuse to confront.
Feature Photo: People gathering at the Sveta Nedelya church and the Palace of Justice in Sofia, 24 February, 2013. Wikimedia Commons, 2024.
Inset Photo: Delyan Peevski, member of the National Assembly of Bulgaria, 2021. Wikimedia Commons, 2024.
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