Excerpts from Euronews interview with prominent Bulgarian social anthropologist Haralan Aleksandrov on the ongoing social and political crisis in Bulgaria.

“The reasons that triggered the mass demonstrations [in February] have been there for years. Some people in Bulgaria are desperately poor, can hardly survive and face hardships, difficulties and poverty. However these issues have been postponed for years.

The resentment and anger were somehow contained within the functioning political system. For some reason this year this arrangement broke up, it just collapsed.

Apparently people can not live any more with this status quo.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the belief that something better is going to happen has died.

Bulgarians live not just in a poor society, but in an impoverished society.

A growing number of people do not have any hopes, they don’t believe that things will change for better and no longer trust the elites – not only the politicians, but anyone who has some position.

Bulgarians feel like children who have been abandoned and left to survive on their own.

Having in mind that for years the culture of dependency has been perpetuated in this country, which is the heritage of the communist totalitarian state, the people are dependent, can not provide for themselves and can not respond to the ideas of entrepreneurship and market economy does not make sense for them.

Most of Bulgaria’s entrepreneurs have left the country or have succeeded in one way or another.

These pockets of poverty have been growing and apparently they have come to a point when it just can not go on like that.

The demonstrations can be seen as a therapeutic attempt to produce some sort of hopefulness, to take some sort of control over the circumstances of their lives.

We have been living for decades in a non-participatory, fake democracy.”

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