The Crisis of Political Marketing: Sociologist Warns of Lackluster Campaigning in Bulgaria’s Sixth Election

The sixth election in three years, attention will hardly be fixed on this campaign. This is what the sociologist Ivo Zhelev, manager of the ESTAT group, told the “Focus” Group.

“About me The big problem is the quality of political marketing, which is currently very low. You mentioned the slow start of some political forces. Some of the first slogans of the parties have been mentioned in recent days, they are again so banal, narrow-minded or stolen from somewhere.

So I don’t expect a very meaningful substantive debate, I don’t expect memorable videos or original methods of political campaigning. After all, the blame for this lies less with political marketers and publicists than with the politicians themselves. Because when we don’t have a good product on the market, it’s normal that marketing can’t sell,” said the sociologist.

“Why are we still without a development guide, a national teaching. The Schengen area and the adoption of the euro have been announced as some of the endpoints of our movement and development, and for me this is unusual. Because these are only some ways on the way to the development and prosperity of the country.

For me, what the president of Croatia said yesterday or the day before yesterday, making the comparison, is also symbolic. He said decisively “We are in last place, only Bulgaria is behind us”. .

And not only material, we are not only materially poor, we are political and spiritual, etc., this is a disaster, it is shameful. There is no answer to the demographic crisis, if we are going down one regional town every year, if there are already less than 50,000 babies born in this country every year, well, it is a disaster this is However, we only deal with the euro, Schengen, armed personnel carriers and the self-sustaining disturbances in our political elite, that’s why we are like this”, Iva Zhelev also says believe

In his words, this is not a political thought. Pettiness and trying to outwit, playing the political opponent, this is not politics, these are things that are at a very low level. We have strategies and we don’t have strategic thinking, that’s the main problem.

There is no attempt to create a national elite, not only for political ones. We don’t have clear enough elite selection mechanisms, we don’t have success criteria, we can’t define what we need to continue to develop as a nation and be successful and compete with the rest of the world. -world.

“The way things are going, at the end of the century, someone will just have to pull the switch, there just won’t be a country of Bulgaria. And that’s what everyone is saying, every reputable demographic, but no one is listening to them.

We all have the evidence, the signs, that we continue to dig the bottom, no matter how formal it is said. We are sending out a parliament which, according to every opposition group in it, is the worst in our recent history.

Of those who dominated and governed, no one was found saying a good word about this National Assembly. This low level of politics continues and was visible throughout parliament. More and more, our messengers fight and swear at each other because they do not have the power to argue and prove the correctness of their position.

I do not know anything, nothing positive in practice that I can point out in the work of this parliament in the year in which it was. In that, what has this parliament really given us? It gave us the convention both as a word and as a construction, it gave us distribution, and of course some inconsistencies such as counter-actions, unfinished, political campaigns that someone then has to step- into the shoes of those who came before and finish it in one way or another to rationalize himself.

Otherwise, if we are talking about some details, we changed the constitution, but without full meaningful legal reform. In practice, these changes were to cut the influence of the president through caretaker governments. The Caretaker Governments Act was also not passed.

In the end, these changes could be called “Anti-Radev Changes”, but tomorrow, in three years, we will have another president, will we change the Basic statute again? the changes of this government brought us,” said the sociologist.