17.06.2019.

The 2019 European elections analysis: a dispatch from Bulgaria

by Jana Tsoneva

The 2019 European elections in Bulgaria yielded results similar to the 2017 national parliamentary elections. In short, they reproduced the tired status quo in the country. The ruling party of GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) emerged victorious with 31.07%, followed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) with 24.26%. The Movement for Rights and Liberties (DPS, colloquially known as the party representing the Turkish and Roma minorities of Bulgaria) was third with 16.55% and the far-right parties got between them 12% but they ran separately, unlike in 2017, since their coalition broke down in spring. Even though the BSP has been unable to topple GERB for a decade now (safe for the 2016 presidential elections when the GERB candidate was just too weak), the EP elections results this year are devastating for the BSP. This is because GERB got bogged down in a series of corruption scandals, flaking off crucial party apparatchiks and for a brief moment the main polling agencies registered a slight electoral preference for the BSP over GERB. Yet, the GERB managed to recuperate and win the elections which should have been fairly easy for the opposition to sweep clean. The other main right-wing party – a coalition between remnants of the first anti-communist opposition of the early 1990s and the Bulgarian Greens - scored 6.06% and they get one MEP who will join the European People’s Party (5.88% are needed for a party or a candidate to earn a seat in the EP). This somewhat paradoxical alliance puts the Greens in the rather uncomfortable position to have helped the EPP – a traditional ‘enemy’ of the European Greens - get one MEP but it must be noted that the Greens in Bulgaria are mostly of liberal-right persuasion because the main current of the late 1980s opposition to the Communist Party ran along ecological lines.

The electoral turnout was only 32.64%, down 3% from 2014. Turnout in Bulgaria is not very high in general and the European elections tend to be the least exciting. The overall picture is indeed bleak and uninteresting, yet on a closer look there are some striking developments. For example, this year the preference for independent candidates grew almost 4-fold. For example, while in 2014 the cumulative result of the three independent candidates was slightly below 1% (0.93%), this year there were not only more independent candidates, but they scored together over 3.8%. The result translates into 72500 votes which is more than what many parties and coalitions got. This indicates a clear majoritarian tendency within Bulgarian politics and an overall exhaustion with the established political parties of the Transition.

Voter profile
According to the polling agency of Gallup, mostly young and middle aged people voted GERB and DPS while voters above 60 years cast their vote for the BSP (38.5%). 40% of senior citizens voted for the BSP and 16% of the unemployed. For some reason, the unemployed percentage is over 24% for GERB which might indicate some bought vote. This might explain why the GERB pooled more votes in the countryside than from Sofia (28% and 26% respectively). The BSP got 22% in Sofia as opposed to 20% from the villages which busts a long-standing cliché that the party represents the “rural proletariat” as opposed to the educated urban middle classes. Among the holders of tertiary education degrees, 30% and 25% voted GERB and BSP respectively, rebuking another long-standing stereotype about the proverbial “uneducated“ BSP voter.

In the run-up to the elections
The atmosphere before the elections was dominated by a grand corruption scandal dubbed “Apartmentgate” by the media. In spring 2019 a scheme was revealed in which high-level party members of GERB and government officials receive luxury residential properties against political favors and legislative services to big construction companies. The BSP naturally tried to exploit the scandal to its advantage by putting stronger emphasis on anti-corruption which traditionally has been the domain of the smaller liberal-right coalition mentioned above. Yet the dismal failure of the BSP to beat the already severely beaten down GERB points to the exhaustion of the politics of anti-corruption.
In addition to the corruption scandal, other topics of discussion prior to the elections were the infamous Istanbul convention which the BSP opposed vehemently and killed, together with the far-right, as well as some failed infrastructural projects, the hallmark of GERB’s decade of ruling.

As stated, the elections did not change the balance of power but reproduced the status quo. As a result, the leader of the BSP Kornelia Ninova resigned and now the party is trying to squeeze internal elections amid preparations for the local elections coming up this fall. They are most likely set to lose those as well and the general trend is towards the eternal reproduction of the current model of center-right domination, beefed up by their cozy connections with business elites and European cash injections for infrastructure.

There were two rather surprising immediate post-election developments. Firstly, the infamous oligarch Delyan Peevski (whose botch promotion as a head of National security triggered mass protests in 2013) from the DPS got a place in the EP but gave it up in order to struggle for a “just taxation” regime domestically. He basically stole the topic from a civic initiative this writer participated in from 2017 which struggles against the flat tax in the country (introduced by the BSP and DPS coalition in 2008). This prompted the PM Borissov to address the issue of taxes from a most prestigious forum – the annual ball of the Confederation of the Employers and Industrialists in Bulgaria and to promise that his government will never touch the taxation regime. We can safely assume that this will be yet another artificial fault-line in the political power field because neither the DPS, as a liberal party, nor Peevski, in his capacity as a millionaire media owner, have any interest in introducing higher income tax for the rich. Meanwhile, Borissov once more pledged loyalty to his real constituency: Big Business.

The other odd and very worrying trend is the PM Borissov’s pledge to reduce the state subsidies of the political parties, a development which will have extremely adverse effects on the entire democratic edifice of the state because it spells the final destruction of the modicum of independence of political parties from Big Business. As it stands, political parties that get at least 1% of votes in parliamentary elections are eligible for state subsidy amounting to 6 EUR per vote received. This subsidy is crucial for political party structure building and growth. Borissov wants to slash that amount to 0.50 EUR, in effect annulling the subsidies. This means that no new political party formation will be possible without oligarchic financial support while it will further entrench the business grip on the established parties. The idea has been circulating for some time now, taken up regularly by different so-called “populist” voices who want to channel popular discontent with the representative system (the other change these forces push for is majoritarian system), but it has never been a “serious” issue for the so-called established and centrist parties. It seems that Borissov pushes for it right after his electoral victory in a desperate bid to entrench the increasingly unpopular political status quo. And it is unpopular because even though GERB is victorious, in reality it represents not more than 680 thousand people (this is based on the turnout of 32% or roughly 2 million people of which GERB got 31%) which is no more than 10% of the Bulgarian population. In addition to that, only 73% of those who voted GERB in the 2017 parliamentary elections repeated their vote in 2019 which is lower than BSP voters (83.6%). This means that even though GERB won, its base is smaller than that of the BSP, thereby giving the party somewhat elusive and precarious majority. My expectation is that the GERB will escalate the bid to artificially safeguard and reproduce its dominance through legalistic meddling with the franchise and with the electoral machinery.

All in all, there have not been any fundamental changes in the political landscape: it is as bleak as it gets in the eternal reproduction of the same tired forces and neoliberal consensus. There are some new actors, such as the youth formation “Give way to the Young”, an offshoot of the now defunct party of the exiled ex-czar Simeon II who became prime minister in 2001 and disappeared from politics two terms later. Yet, they are new but only in the limited sense of new faces and actors. Their ideology is the same old neoliberal technocratic that voters tend to reject throughout Europe.

The Left
The left parties scored a negligible 0.86%. The non-BSP left consisted of the Bulgarian Left Party (a member of the European Left) and the Alternative for Bulgarian Revival (ABV) – a nationalist BSP-splinter group created by the ex-president Georgi Parvanov (2002-2012). It has traditionally stood to the right of the BSP. For example, in 2014, in his capacity as a social policy minister, the party member Ivaylo Kalfin introduced extremely racist restrictions to child benefits. The coalition between the BL and the ABV (and 5 more smaller parties) adopted a moniker the BSP used and discarded last parliamentary elections, in a gamble to deflect confused BSP voters. Their result shows that the strategy of hiding ideological bankruptcy behind identity theft does not work. Their campaign pivoted on the demographic crisis, energetics, “the national interest” and closer ties with Russia.

In this drab political landscape, the sole exception was Vanya Grigorova, a trade unionist who ran as an independent candidate on 100% workers issues and rights platform. Unfortunately, Grigorova got 0.5%. Seems that worker's rights can mobilize even less efficiently than anti-corruption. Yet, given that it is her first ever try it is not that bad of a result. Also, we need to bear in mind how rigged the system is.

And it is rigged on every level. For example, the big parties buy votes and are rumored to falsify ballots. But the system is rigged also when working according to its legal parameters. For example, the conditions for media access already privilege the big parties and those who have oligarchs to bankroll them. 1.5 mins of commercial air time on National TV cost almost 1300 EUR, so naturally a poor campaign such as Grigorova’s could not afford a lot of air time. The state subsidizes contestants, but it gives independent candidates only 2500 EUR for media appearance whereas parties get 10 times this amount. There is no competing with this kind of money power. So as usual, the richer you are the cheaper it is for you to compete on elections.

In short, I'd rather blame Grigorova’s result on the skewed electoral rules (plus the further illicit bending thereof) which privilege the incumbent and big players and screen out alternatives. Unfortunately, the novelty of her message could not overcome the paywall and the other obstacles before the campaign. And she was a genuine novelty: she was the first candidate genuinely representing workers and the disabled. The latter makes her a pioneer in the whole of Europe inasmuch as the disabled, being one of the most invisible and marginalized demographics, have no political representation on the continent (and continue not to).

First conclusions for the left
It is a truism that only way one can stop the far-right is via genuine working class-centered campaign. As the story goes, the far-right is an ersatz-left, filling the vacuum left by the social-democrats embracing neoliberal centrism and so on. Alas, it seems more complicated. (Unless the sole reason for Grigorova’s low result is due to the media blackout but we will never know for sure). In no way does that mean the left must capitulate to the far-right themes and frames. As we saw, that strategy didn't help even the BSP. But maybe we should accept that a sizable segment of society is genuinely moved by identitarian issues and the latter are not just a distorted left politics looking for its “correct” form.

0.5% or 9300 votes are nothing electorally, but that figure is a huge force in grassroots terms. Politics is not exhausted by elections even though gaining control of the state apparatus should be the objective of every self-respecting leftist force. We, the people around Grigorova, are not going to leave it at that and will build on that little momentum. We rallied and counted ourselves and it is not a bad number for a country as vitriolically anti-communist as Bulgaria.

The real task at hand now is how to reach the true winner of the elections: the 5 million strong Party of the Unrepresented.

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