BULGARIA POLITICS

Here are the facts. Former Construction Minister Lilyana Pavlova, who is now Minister for Bulgaria's Presidency of the EU, fired the general manager of the National Palace of Culture, or NDK, Miroslav Borshosh. Pavlova, who used to belong to Prime Minister Boyko Borisov's inner circle but is now seen as being demoted to what in effect will be just a temporary ministry, cited massive wrongdoing for her decision. She said the planned reconstruction works to modernise the huge building in central Sofia lagged behind.

The barbed-wire fence supposed to prevent refugees from entering the EU's poorest member state, Bulgaria, is almost ready. After about four years of construction work, the roughly 240-kilometre fence now proudly stands in the middle of the Strandzha forest, in what is supposed to be a nature park. Its usefulness is disputable and there are ongoing allegations of misappropriation and wrongdoing.

The Fence, as it has become known in Bulgarian daily language, has a long and controversial history spanning almost six decades.

Political scientist Professor (Oxon) Evgeniy Daynov put it succinctly: "This is a government of thugs, of brokers of organised crime… of pronounced Kremlin agents, of Nazis and of clerks with gangster-Nazi inclinations."

For obvious reasons, Bulgarian domestic politics is not readily understandable to outsiders especially those who don't speak Bulgarian. How could you explain the setup in the new Bulgarian parliament to an outsider who knows about Europe and the United States, but who is unable to understand who and what stands behind names such as GERB, Ataka, United Patriots and Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation?

The result is known: Boyko Borisov won the 26 March snap election which he himself had called in late in 2016, causing a political crisis, prolonged and acrimonious public debate, and increased expenditure for taxpayers. His party, GERB, garnered over 33 percent of the vote, thus becoming the largest party in parliament. Second is Borisov’s "arch enemy," the BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party.

Loosely picking on the tune of The Beatles's Let It Be, Kolev set it to Bulgarian verse. Its refrain ran like this: "When will we catch up with the Americans?"

Concert venues and town squares cheered on when Todor Kolev made his appearance. Audiences jumped up and intoned: "When shall we catch up with the Americans?" "When? When? When?..."

Like so many other things in Bulgaria since 2009, it all started with the inimitable mixture of populism and demagoguery of this country's outgoing prime minister, Boyko Borisov. The current political crisis has its roots in Borisov's threat to resign in case his handpicked nominee for president, Tsetska Tsacheva, failed to win. Which she did in the November ballot, by an unprecedented margin in Bulgaria's presidential elections since the fall of Communism.

While he was in his heyday, Bulgaria's prime minister, Boyko Borisov, used to deride learned men and women by calling them "the guys wearing spectacles." Notoriously, he used to boast that in his lifetime he had read only one book, a Western story entitled Winnetou and written by a 19th century German writer, Karl May. He also used to woo workers protesting over their unpaid wages by assuring them that they were "simple folk" and because he himself was a "simple man" they would get together well.

If Jung and Freud were to meet in Bulgaria and hold one of their notorious disputes, Jung would probably win: mythology would get the upper hand over analysis.

Notwithstanding the sometimes very complicated details of the daily twists and turns of Bulgarian politics under GERB, they can be summed up with what some Western commentators describe as Post-Truth Politics: a strongman leader at the top tells myths to his audiences and is then able to get away with it for a long, long time because voters are led by emotions rather than facts.

Less than a couple of months ahead of the presidential election scheduled for 6 November, the ruling GERB refuses to disclose who its nominees are for fear they might be put under pressure by uncompliant journalists and get asked the wrong set of questions. Read this again. You've got it right.

The Bulgarian parliament approved a draft counterterrorism bill meant to give wide-ranging powers to law enforcement. The bill will empower the army to be able to make arrests and assume policing functions. It would also grant the police rights to detain citizens, impound vehicles, destruct property, tap communications, impose surveillance on emails, listen in on phone calls and so on and so forth, acting only on suspicion and without any evidence.

Prince Potemkin, the Russian military leader, statesman, nobleman, artist and reputedly lover of Catherine the Great, once erected a series of cardboard villages to impress his patroness on her visit to Crimea, in 1787. Since that time, the expression "Potemkin Village" has gone down in all world languages to denote a pretentiously showy facade intended to mask or divert the attention of the public from the unpleasant reality. Erecting Potemkin villages has been used with great success throughout the history of the Soviet Union, now Russia.

Imagine you spoke Bulgarian, watched Bulgarian TV, bought Bulgarian newspapers, conferred on important issues with your Bulgarian pals on FB, and delved into the darker recesses of the Internet where there are plenty of nebulous websites purporting to carry news about Bulgaria. If you did that, you have two options. One is to go mad within a couple of hours. The other? You will discover that the sort of Bulgaria "described" by the media is very different from the Bulgaria you see on Bulgarian National Television – or out in the street.

There are two ways to interpret Bulgaria's Boyko Borisov's out-of-the-blue announcements that he was terminating a series of public contracts because he had heard rumours that the contracts, concluded under the Public Works and Contracts Act, had not been sufficiently transparent. One is to believe the prime minister that he is serious about fighting corruption and the sort of nefarious practices Bulgaria has gained notoriety for in the EU.

When in a society everyone wants to have full power, it indicates that its members are ready for either tyranny or anarchy, the two opposites of freedom, said Professor Lyubomir Miletich, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Miletich, who was born in Stip, in what is now the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia in 1863 and died in Sofia in 1937, did not live long enough to see what his compatriots, many decades on, would be doing with tyranny, anarchy and freedom.

The Bulgarian Holy Synod, the most senior body of the Orthodox Church, issued an official statement urging the government not to accept refugees who did not belong to the Christian, preferably the Orthodox, faith because, it said, refuges jeopardised, among other things, Bulgaria's very statehood. In this way Bulgaria's top priests put themselves at sharp variance with most other Christian churches in the world, including The Vatican, the Church of England, most Protestant denominations, and even other Orthodox churches including the Greek and the Romanian.

Many people in Bulgaria sincerely think that the West in general and the United States in particular are responsible for Ukraine's wish for more democracy which led to Russia's annexation of Crimea, for the emergence of the IS, for the increasing instability in the Middle East and, most recently, for the fecal spillout in one of Bulgaria's top resorts at the southern Black Sea coast. They tend to think that it is the West and the United States that "stirred up" trouble in Ukraine, "created" the IS and so on and so forth.

Bulgaria has notoriously failed to help solve one of the most gruesome crimes of the Cold War, the 1978 assassination in London of dissident writer Georgi Markov. No one has been brought to justice. Yet, in 2014 the writer got honoured, at least symbolically, by the erection of a statue of him, placed in one of the squares in the Lozenets quarter in Sofia.

The statue was sculpted by Plovdiv sculptor Danko Dankov and paid for by a Bulgarian emigre doctor in the United States, Georgi Lazarov, acting through his St George Foundation.

In previous years the 10th of November, the date when Bulgaria's Communist strongman, Todor Zhivkov, was toppled from power in an internal party coup, was a low key affair. Few newspapers wrote about it, and Bulgarians, usually glued to the morning shows and evening soaps on TV, did not seem to care.

To understand why Bulgaria is faced with further political instability and possibly yet another general election one needs to look at the larger picture of life in this country that has struggled with democracy for exactly quarter of a century now.