Context: Bulgaria’s July 5 General Elections
(Note: Dr. Ognyan Minchev is the Executive Director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria.)
SOFIA — An unexpectedly high turnout of more than 60 percent has swept away the governing “Triple Coalition” of ex-communist socialists and liberals at the general elections in Bulgaria of July 5. The victory of the center-right populist GERB Party was expected, yet not in such a landslide, which actually brought the GERB leader — charismatic Sofia mayor Boyko Borisov — to the threshold of absolute parliamentary majority.
GERB, which in effect is a personal political project of the former police general, fire brigade psychologist, and national karate coach Borisov, scored almost 40 percent of the total vote. The party gets 116 out of 240 seats at the National Assembly, leaving the second-in-line Socialists far behind with less than 18 percent of the vote and with 40 seats. The second partner of the governing socialists — the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), supported mostly by ethnic Turks and Muslims, received 14.5 percent of the votes, which amounts to an unprecedented high of 610,000 voters. The Movement of ex-king Simeon — the third member of the governing coalition — has practically left the political scene with just 3.2 percent of the vote, which left the party below the 4 percent threshold for representation required by Bulgarian electoral system.
Two small fractions of the once glorious democratic movement — the UDF of the 1990s — this time united efforts in the center-right Blue Coalition and got close to 7 percent of the vote — enough to survive as a parliamentary force and probably to assist GERB in achieving absolute majority in parliament. Both GERB and the Blue Coalition hold membership in the European People’s Party — the Christian Democratic family of Europe, which makes them natural allies despite their mutual partisan suspicions on a personal basis. Another fraction of hard-line conservative populists — the Law, Order and Justice Party — also made it to the Parliament with just 4.13 per cent of the vote, thus opening an additional partnership choice for the GERB leadership. Last but not least, hard nationalist and populist Ataka (”Attack”) Party took almost 9.5 percent of the vote on a ticket of radical anti-Turkish and anti-corruption populist campaigning.
We could hardly assess this “cocktail” of electoral results without departing from the basic division lines of Bulgarian politics of the last four years. The governing coalition of socialists, ethnic Turks, and ex-king loyalists, which emerged from the general elections of 2005 defined itself as an instrument of compromise among parties of diverse platforms in favor of Bulgaria’s successful joining of the EU on January 1, 2007. The country was facing significant difficulties in convincing Brussels of its preparedness to join European institutional standards after the controversial record of the 2001-2005 government headed by the ex-king Simeon and the MRF leader Ahmet Dogan. High levels of institutional corruption (both political and administrative), a poor-performing justice system, and administrative inefficiency were among the key concerns among European decision-makers in assessing Bulgaria’s membership application. The Triple Coalition, headed by the socialist leader Sergey Stanishev as prime minister, was designed to pass the country through the narrow doors of the EU in reforming the ailing Bulgarian institutional system.
It was sooner the wish of Brussels to consider Bulgaria reformed enough, rather than the performance in institutional reform of the Triple Coalition, which navigated the country successfully to the EU membership in 2007. Once the membership was a fact, the legitimacy basis for the Triple Coalition government expired — particularly provided its modest success record. Yet coalition members decided to complete their four-year term. This decision was wrong. The government had neither integrity nor real institutional potential to make hard decisions in favor of national interest. The Triple Coalition was constructed as a corporate entity with three parties – shareholders in common business. Political positions and institutional benefits were shared in the proportion of 8:5:3 in favor of socialists, ex-king loyalists, and ethnic Turks. Each party guarded its feuds, sucking out the maximum benefits of control over ministries and other national institutions. Common government priorities were left largely in the hands of the prime minister, whose power was seriously impeded by the informal design of power-sharing both within his own Socialist Party and among the three party leaders in the coalition.
After achieving EU membership, the reformist potential of the Triple Coalition declined decisively. The second half of the mandate was marked with growing corruption at the highest political level, expansion of organized crime, helplessness of the judiciary, and impotence of the public administrative system, sinking into self-sufficient helplessness. Growing claims on behalf of Brussels against basic inadequacy of Bulgaria’s public institutional system to EU standards mounted to blockades of EU credit lines — both pre-accession and membership (structural and cohesion) funds — for Bulgaria. The public was discovering that the Triple Coalition was in effect jeopardizing Bulgaria’s EU status.
Institutional inadequacy came hand in hand with growing arrogance in the public performance of party leaders and major executive figures of the government. This arrogance extended to unprecedented violation of institutional rules and democratic procedures in preparing for the upcoming general elections in 2009. Bulgarian electoral standards have worsened throughout the decade after 2000. Instead of keeping and strengthening the country’s positive legacy of free and fair elections throughout the 1990s, both political factors and vested interests insistently eroded the legitimacy of the electoral process in the last 7-8 years. Systems of mass scale buying of votes expanded to cover marginal groups and rural parts of the country. Practices of organized pressure on behalf of corporate business, political parties, and local criminal groups developed to levels of seriously endangering the representation process.
Civil society groups initiated a public campaign against the practices of buying votes and exercising pressure upon voters, offering an “Integrity Pact” to the political parties for joining their efforts in favor of restoring a free and fair electoral process. Most parties signed the Pact, yet the parties of government considered their signatures largely nominal. The governmental majority in Parliament passed highly controversial amendments into the electoral law at the last moment possible in order to deprive both opposition and public opinion the right to debate and oppose the changes. Those changes were considered potentially favorable for the government parties’ performance at the ballot box, which did not prove the case at the end. The security services of the state (in particular the State Agency for National Security – DANS) were misused by the government in order to support puppet political fractions, considered potent to drain support from the government political opponents. The court system was misused — together with the government-dominated Central Electoral Commission — in rejecting legitimate registration of particular political parties (UDF for example) for the elections.
The elections for European Parliament on June 7 were considered a rehearsal to the general elections a month later. GERB won a moderate majority of 6 percent ahead of the Socialists after an expected relatively low turnout of 38 percent. GERB is a young party with small inner nucleus of hard core supporters and a large periphery of potential voters. On the other hand, the Socialists enjoy relatively wide hard-core support and almost no potential in the periphery. Low turnout grants privileges to the Socialists’ electoral record. The results of the European elections were considered promising for the Triple Coalition’s chances to remain in office in a redesigned formula of power sharing: GERB would be a moderate winner at the general elections again and would need the support of at least 2 or 3 more parties in order to govern. Why not GERB with the Socialist Party and, maybe, the ethnic Turks’ Party?
All those calculations, made in public, produced widespread despair among a growing number of citizens, heavily disappointed by the Triple Coalition’s government record. Expected electoral cheating and fraud, widely organized buying of votes, and pressure on voters, together with governing parties’ arrogance in re-claiming another mandate, enraged significant sections of Bulgarian society, in particular the urban middle class, which suffered most from widespread corruption and institutional inefficiency. There was only one option to counter the Socialists’ strategy to crawl back to power – a high turnout. Quite powerful awareness-raising campaigns by NGOs and oppositional parties made voting desirable and necessary for a growing number of citizens who felt disenfranchised with political disgust and despair after a number of disappointing electoral choices in the past. A wave of 2/3 of actual voters (the electoral lists are wider than the real number of voters in the country) swept away the triple formula of cheating the voters in favor of a small corporate structure — political minority at the top, organized around the status quo ex-Communist elites, both socialist and liberal.
This is why the impressive electoral score of GERB on July 5 is composed of two parts: first, supporters of GERB Party and its leader Borisov, and, second, newly enfranchised pessimists who voted for the most obvious alternative against the Triple Coalition status quo. This composition of electoral support for GERB unfolds both opportunities and strength, as well as potential weaknesses of this party in government. GERB holds a clear mandate for change and reform in the country. Yet the winners around Boyko Borisov will have to face severe challenges and limitations. First, the world financial crisis, which is just rushing on Bulgaria after having swept Europe’s west and north. Second, the government of GERB will have to face an urgent priority of reforming Bulgaria’s institutional system before regaining the benefits of the EU funds for the country. Third, B. Borisov and his team will have to deal with their relative inexperience of government in a time when urgent and punctual decisions will need to be made.