Garvan Walshe is a former national and international security policy adviser to the Conservative Party.
Some said they were the biggest protests since the fall of communism, or at least since the late 1990s when Bulgaria was struck by hyperinflation (it peaked at 2000% in the year to March 1997).
They were triggered by parliamentary sharp practice by the governing coalition, which tried to sneak a new tax-raising and debt-raising budget past the required parliamentary committee during the lunch break.
The government had hoped to slip the budget through ahead of its scheduled time, which was due to coincide with a protest called by the opposition.
The trick backfired spectacularly. An opposition politician filibustered the committee. People flocked to join the protests. Boyko Borisov (the official unofficial Prime Minister) withdrew the budget, then un-withdrew it, probably on the orders of Deyleen Peevksi (the unofficial unofficial Prime Minister). The official official Prime Minister, Rozen Zhelyazkov, officially withdrew the budget on Tuesday, surrounded by aides whose expression would have been familiar to Marco Rubio as he watched the vice-president lay into Volodymyr Zelensky.
The plan had been to raise the Bulgarian equivalent of national insurance (which is high in Bulgaria, but capped) double the dividend tax paid by business owners, and increase government borrowing just as Bulgaria was to join the Euro. The money was largely to be spent adding to the funding for the interior ministry.
It sparked fury.
The specific terms were problematic. Bulgaria has very low blue-collar crime, and people rather suspected the extra money was not going to be spent on the overworked anti-corruption unit. But the protests have been part of a series that began in the summer following the arrest of the mayor of the coastal city of Varna in what is, at best a case of selective prosecution and at worst outright intimidation of the opposition.
The current Bulgarian governing alliance is a murky alliance of networks controlled by Borisov, Peevksi and others that they present to the West as the only bulwark against pro-Russian populism, and to the pro-Russian populists as the last line of defence against “LGBT propaganda” an the other sins of modernity.
As leader of the centre-right GERB party, the largest, Borisov in particular presents himself as the ordinary man, a former firefighter, who’s able to talk to the ordinary Bulgarian in ways that the urban based centrist parties can’t. He combined this with, until recently, staunch support for Ukraine and integration of Bulgaria into the EU. It is under his government that Bulgaria was approved for membership of the Euro, though its currency was pegged to the Deutchmark and then the Euro so there is less to this than meets the eye.
But this latest government has begun to alienate GERB’s normal centre-right supporters. They worry about his closeness to Peevski, who is under Magnitsky sanctions in the US, and UK sanctions for “bribery” and increased corruption this involves. They certainly don’t trust the government not to steal the extra money they had hoped to raise in taxes or appropriate through extra government debt.
Bulgarian politics is fragmented, with no party having one more than about a quarter of the vote at any of the elections held since 2021. Borisov’s GERB had been able to hold the line against the modernising We Continue the Change on the one side and radical nationalists on the other, but was unable to dominate completely. Stable parliamentary majorities were difficult and Bulgaria, to the horror of Brenda from Bristol, endured seven elections since. Exhausted and disappointed by their inability to reform the system, We Continue the Change slumped to 14 per cent last year, allowing (or requiring) GERB to form its current unwieldy coalition with a nationalist populist and a post-communist party, which depends on Peevski’s MPs to make up its majority.
Now this government appears to have overreached. Convinced it would not have to face the voters for four years, it had begun to show contempt for the people. Worryingly for the administration, Monday’s protests appear to have attracted quite number of GERB supporters, according to Radan Kanev, MEP for a different centre-right party, Democratic Bulgaria, which is part of the We Continue the Change alliance.
An exodus of centre-right voters, whether to DB, or to more liberal centrist parties, could tip the balance in Bulgarian politics and help it escape from the three-way impasse that has prevented the reforms needed to dismantle, or at least significantly weaken the networks of corruption that continue to blight the country’s politics. Borisov himself is not universally popular in GERB, important parts of which would prefer to return to ordinary business friendly conservatism. The most recent reforms, to free the judiciary from the control of the prosecutor’s office were passed by an GERB-Continue the Change administration, but then blocked by the same judiciary’s constitutional court.
If the protestors can keep up the momentum and force the government to resign, new elections might just deliver Bulgaria from four years of political paralysis.
