Bulgaria is suffering from a long political COVID with severe consequences: modest economic growth, low voter turnout, excessive political cynicism and marginalization of Bulgaria in Europe, writes Ivan Krastev in the “Financial Times”.
Do you know the name of the Bulgarian Prime Minister? I’m pretty sure you don’t know. But don’t feel embarrassed by this – most Bulgarians don’t know the name of their prime minister either. And how could they, after Bulgaria went through six parliamentary elections in just three years. Four times the newly elected parliament failed to form a government. On the two occasions when a government was formed, it lasted less than a year and showed all the defects of an arranged marriage. On October 27, Bulgarians will vote again. The chance of electing a government is 50/50, writes political scientist Ivan Krastev in a Financial Times publication, quoted by “Deutsch Vele”.
So far, the effects of this Bulgarian version of the long political Covid include: modest economic growth; low voter turnout, which continues to fall (in October it is expected to be around 30%); excessive political cynicism; growth of new protest parties; paralyzed bureaucracy; marginalization of Bulgaria on the European political scene.
But while the situation may seem depressing, one of the reasons why you probably haven’t heard of the Bulgarian prime minister is that, at least for now, the country is keeping the hard right out of government – unlike Hungary or Slovakia. But is Bulgaria a success or a failure?
The case with Bulgaria is contagious
Instead of a populist nightmare, Bulgaria is a frozen democracy. The suspicion is that political parties cannot govern because they do not want to govern. It is more important for their constituents to know who they will not cooperate with than what can be achieved. The unresolved question of Bulgarian politics is: who actually rules the country?
The case of Bulgaria could be dismissed as a kind of political exoticism, were it not for the fact that it is contagious. What might be called dead-end democracy – run by short-lived governments or technocratic administrations that have enough votes to survive for a while but not enough support to govern – is the new trend in Europe. The new French government led by Michel Barnier, for example, is like that. The government that will emerge from Germany’s federal elections next year may be different. In both cases, the fear of repressive right-wing governments threatens to bring oppressive centrist governments to power.
A society torn apart by cynicism and mistrust
Bulgarian history is not the history of a country deeply divided in terms of values or policies. Rather, it is about a society torn apart by cynicism and mistrust. The dividing lines between political parties are too many and the fear of compromise too great, so politicians calculate that voters reward them for what they don’t do, not what they do.
While the rise of the populist right often leads to higher voter turnout and renewed interest in politics, the polarized fragmentation we see in Bulgaria leads to public disenchantment with politics. In polarized democracies such as Poland, Turkey or the USA, the electoral success of the populist right causes strong civil and democratic mobilization. In Bulgaria, on the contrary, the result of the policy of polarized fragmentation is widespread resignation.
Disenchantment with democracy
Authoritarian majoritarianism, the contestation of elections and the conquest of public institutions by the ruling party are the main results of extreme polarization. Any change of government in a polarized democracy is a form of regime change. But the main result of the deadly cocktail of polarization and fragmentation is usually a deep disenchantment with democracy.
From the outside, the “Bulgarian disease” can be seen as the lesser evil compared to the presence of the hard right in government. It creates the illusion that the center is still holding. But this judgment will probably have to be revised. Civil society intuitively knows what to do when a party like the Polish “Law and Justice” comes to power. It is much less obvious what civil society should do when no one knows the name of the Prime Minister (Dimitar Glavchev, by the way) and has no reason to learn it.
When asked to define pornography, an American judge said, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Europe’s problem today is just the opposite. While authoritarianism is easy to define, perhaps the challenge is to define the slow drift away from democracy, especially when it happens in our own backyard.
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