/ world today news/ At the briefing after the plenary session of the National Council on Saturday, May 1, Cornelia Ninova stated that the three new parties in the parliament showed “political immaturity and a lack of culture for political dialogue” and could not “escape from their egos. Which is the reason why there is no government with the mandate of the BSP.
But before you accuse others of a lack of culture for political dialogue, you should first look at yourself. And not in your own mirror, but through the eyes of others. This is what the BSP voters said just a month ago, on April 4th: only 15 percent of them voted confidence in the party as the bearer of an alternative to the status quo; only 480,146 cast their vote for the BSP – the lowest result since 1990, of which only 15.8 percent were under the age of 39.
Further, with their vote, the voters assigned the BSP the place of only the third political force instead of the first, which is a complete failure of the task set by the 50th Congress of the party. Moreover, in seven constituencies the BSP remained in fourth place, including the 16th MIR Plovdiv city with 12.65% and the 25th MIR Sofia city with 14.70% of the votes, in which K. Ninova was the leader of the party lists.
These results require, first of all, the leader to make a harsh and merciless assessment of the reasons for the failure and, first of all, of his personal responsibility. Such an assessment requires you to answer a whole series of questions. The first – was I able to cultivate a constructive dialogue in the parliament and society with the formations and environments rejecting the management of GERB? And not only in the pre-election period, but far before that – in the last four or five years? So, regardless of ideological and political differences, to arrive at a broad left and democratic movement capable of overthrowing Borissov and GERB. Or on the contrary – didn’t the extremely aggressive language from the parliamentary rostrum become one of the serious reasons that many people who would have supported the party instead turned their backs on it and left it without visible partners and wider support in the last election?
And further on the topic of a culture of political dialogue: is it now permissible to seek support for the formation of a cabinet from the new parties in parliament, while giving unqualified assessments of their behavior from the “height” of your own electoral failure? Instead of showing that you understand the reasons for their refusal to talk to you, by completely changing the tone, or best – by giving way to another, far more dialogic representative of the party to conduct the conversations with these parties.
The apparent lack of such self-esteem speaks of a complete inability to “escape from your own ego”, to accept that you are not irreplaceable and that the interests of the party you lead clearly require you to step aside. But such a consciousness is, of course, incompatible with the self-confidence that you do not admit any mistakes – neither in big nor in small matters…
In fact, the responsible decision of a real leader in such cases is to resign on the eve of the election failure. No delay and no appointments! Both as a manifestation of an elementary political culture of behavior and as giving a chance to the BSP to go to the coming elections renewed and charged with the necessary energy for electoral victory.
Therefore, because the “calm and sober” preservation of the status quo in the party does not stop the flow of its long-term members and sympathizers, nor does it promise anything good to the new parliamentary elections that are coming up in just two months. This puts a new spin on our well-known question “what to do”. Even under the current conditions, two or three things are perfectly feasible. First, the National Election Headquarters headed by its leader should be released immediately and a new composition confirmed so that the messages of the BSP can be heard both within the party itself and in the society.
Second, the preparation of the pre-election platform should be entrusted to the team from the Commission for ideological and programmatic development of the National Assembly of the BSP, which at the end of 2020 proposed “Ideological orientations and proposals for the pre-election platform of the BSP”, in which the staging occupied a decisive place, that “in socio-economic policy we are guided by the principles: “labour is the immediate source of goods”, “social capital is most important for the progress of society”, “democracy is incomplete if it does not achieve social justice”. Of which there is no mention in the published platform, in which the leading request is for “transformation of the economy, built on two main pillars – digitalization and hydrogen economy”!?
But both a new composition of the headquarters and a different collective for the platform do not solve the key question – is there any chance in the upcoming new elections that the BSP will get more votes than the disastrously small result of the ones that have just passed? The short answer is more than clear: Notif we “carry on” in the way we have been; Yes, maybeif the forces are found in the circles of the party to immediately start dismantling the destructive “Ninova reform” with the first step being her resignation.
#culture #dialogue #ego #resignation