Political Troubles in Bulgaria
We have previously written about “Bulgaria’s Strange Bank Runâ€, but is appears the saga is not quite over yet, so we are providing an update on the developments since then. Keep also the curious temporal synchronicity with the most recent developments in the South Stream saga in mind. We have wondered if there could be a connection between these events. We don’t know obviously, and have as of yet not seen the possibility mentioned anywhere. It wouldn’t surprise us though.
There have been extensive protests against the government of technocrat Plamen Oresharski in Sofia in 2013 that were originally triggered by the appointment of Bulgarian media mogul Delyan Peevski to the post of chief of the National Security Agency. The parliamentary debate on his nomination reportedly took a mere 15 minutes. The protests then forced the government to fire Peevsky from his post again a month later (officially, he withdrew voluntarily). However, the protests still continued thereafter.
Protests against the appointment of Peevsky as head of the State Agency of National Security began in Sofia in mid 2013. The demonstrations had been organized via Facebook. A number of academics declared themselves appalled at the anti-communist slant of the protests. For instance, the chairman of the Institute for Modern Politics, Borislav Tsekov, reportedly deplored the “primitive anti-communism” espoused by the protesters. However, there also were rumors that the usual suspect Western NGOs were behind the protests. The demonstrations curiously dwindled right after the government indicated it would greenlight the construction of a nuclear power plant by Westinghouse. This has subsequently indeed happened (see the preceding article on South Stream).
Concurrently with Peevsky’s nomination, the laws governing the security agency were altered rather dramatically. In the weeks leading up to Peevski’s appointment, parliament had approved major changes to the legal framework governing the national security agency (DANS for short), which inter alia gave its head unprecedented powers.
Among the changes were:
1. DANS was no longer part of the interior ministry and instead put under direct control of the cabinet
2. the Anti-Organized Crime Directorate was no longer to be controlled by the interior ministry and instead placedunder the direct control of DANS
3. the President’s right to nominate the head of the security agency was rescinded.
Bulgaria’s political situation is quite complicated. One aspect of the political backdrop that one intuits by reading between the lines of press reports (especially in the context of the South Stream pipeline), is that there are political forces that have strong pro-European leanings and others that have a favorable view of extensive commercial relations with Russia (of course Bulgaria is a member of the EU, so its government must obey edicts from Brussels whether it wants to or not). However, even that is not as simple and straightforward as it may sound. This is not a split comparable to that we can observe in the Ukraine.
In Bulgaria’s political landscape there is e.g. a political party that exclusively represents the country’s fairly large Turkish minority (the “Movement for Rights and Freedomsâ€), which although small, is often needed for coalitions in order to achieve voting majorities in parliament. The party is strongly pro-EU. Then there is the “Coalition for Bulgariaâ€, an alliance of different socialist parties, as well as the conservative party, which is called “Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria” (‘GERB’ for short, after its Bulgarian acronym). Mr. Borisov, whom we have mentioned in the context of South Stream, is the leader of this party, which makes his apparent support for the pipeline rather curious. Normally it is the socialist alliance that is considered more Russia-friendly. Lastly, there is the nationalist “Attack†party (nomen est omen). In addition there exist numerous smaller parties that are currently not in parliament.
