What a Terrible Time for Europe to Show Bulgaria the Cold Shoulder

Views on BG | March 7, 2013, Thursday // 10:07
Bulgaria: What a Terrible Time for Europe to Show Bulgaria the Cold Shoulder For Bulgaria, 6 March was a day of national mourning, after Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old man, set himself alight in protest against corruption in his home city, Varna. Photo by BGNES

The Guardian

Yavor Siderov

Plamen Goranov set himself alight in a country desperate to reform itself. Emigration is not at the forefront of Bulgarian minds.

For Bulgaria, 6 March is a day of national mourning, after Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old man, set himself alight in protest against corruption in his home city, Varna.

Three days earlier, inadvertently anticipating Plamen's demise by a mere 24 hours, the German interior minister Hans-Peter Friedrich had told Spiegel magazine that should the need arise, his country would veto Bulgaria and Romania's entry into the EU's Schengen free movement zone. Membership had been keenly desired by government officials in both Sofia and Bucharest, which have long since fulfilled the technical criteria for admission. Many in Bulgaria find symbolic value in the near coincidence of the two events.

The German cold shoulder comes hot on the heels of a weeks-long controversy over whether Romanian and Bulgarian migrants will abuse British social security funds once the last restrictions on the free employment of nationals from the two countries are removed. The UK focus on an apparently imminent deluge of impoverished Balkanites poised to siphon money off generous and naive Britons was matched by similarly framed media storms in the Netherlands and France. Twenty-four years after the end of communism, there seems to be precious little left of the solidarity promised those who were unfortunate enough to be caught on the wrong side of the iron curtain and who had only recently emerged blinking into the daylight.

The Anglo-German snub, provisional and discordant as it is, could not have come at a worse time for Bulgarians. Their country went through two torturous decades of post-communist transition, was bankrupted twice and therefore many here saw EU membership, attained in 2007 after 18 years in the wilderness as just reward for their trials. What is more, spurred by a European Central Bank operating in crisis mode, Bulgaria's centre-right government imposed a strict regime of austerity that all but choked the economy, fed unemployment and caused people's disposable incomes to plummet. All the while Bulgarians were being told that it was a point of pride they had one of Europe's lowest debt-to-GDP ratios and that fiscal health was a pan-EU priority of the first order.

Now Bulgarians must suffer the double indignity of a catastrophic drop in living standards and being told that they do not really belong after all. Small wonder then that what began a fortnight ago as protests against the high prices of electricity quickly turned into an explosive mixture of demands – for direct rather than representative democracy, for a majoritarian electoral system over the current, party-favouring proportional one, for a new constitution, for the expulsion of monopolies controlling the utilities. Widespread poverty and the nagging sense of being second-class citizens resulted in the biggest anti-government rallies the country has seen since 1997, when inflation ran at 300% and people's savings evaporated overnight.

The government of populist PM Boiko Borisov promptly resigned, plunging Bulgaria into political as well as economic crisis. Borisov's indecently hasty departure caused some to suspect Moscow's involvement, Russia being a powerful player in the energy business regionally. Others point the finger at the US. There is a palpable sense of confusion on the streets as ordinary people and false messiahs clutch at ideological and conspiratorial straws.

The irony of all this is that political participation, chaotic as it is, has drowned out all talk of emigration. Bulgarians are out to reform their country and improve their lot and they can teach Europe a thing or two about the dangers of populism. Plamen Goranov's sacrifice may not resonate in the west as loudly as Jan Palach's did during the Prague spring 40-odd years earlier, but to Bulgarians it is just as cathartic. The big players in the EU might want to sit up and take notice. It may be worthwhile rediscovering the value of pan-European solidarity, for everyone's sake.

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Tags: Varna, TIM, Kiril Yordanov, protests, Plamen Goranov, Ivan Vazov, mourning, Plamen Goranov, protests, Boyko Borisov, poverty, stagnation, corruption, TIM, Varna, Radnevo, Veliko Tarnovo, GERB, election

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