The Chances for Bulgaria’s Anti-Post Communist Revolution

After the Bulgarian elections, there are few possibilities of creating a viable government without some rapprochement between old and new parties. Given this current outlook, it seems that no government or caretaker government will serve the purpose of the old order better than the revolutionaries. Are the protest parties willing to make concessions or rather risk new elections organised by a captured state?

Bulgaria has entered the early days of its second post-communist revolution. Twenty-four years ago, in 1997 the Bulgarians gained their first genuinely non-communist government which brought the country to the EU and NATO.

With the return of King Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha as Prime Minister in 2001, the informal post-communist structures, steered by former members of the secret police paved the way for Borisov’s rule, which dominated Bulgarian politics since 2009.

During this period, Bulgaria has become a country of deep dissonance between the pro-European, anti-corruption and reformist rhetoric that clashed with the enduring corruption, nepotism, draining of public finances and EU funds, continuous demographic decline and dominance of the informal oligarchic networks.