Its just after 6pm, the light dying out, the air cold.

Gradually, people start gathering on what has become

an established route: from the Council of Ministers to the
yellow cobbled streets of the National Assembly. The crowd
expands, lling Tsarigradsko Boulevard all the way to Soa
University, enveloping the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, its
golden domes buttressing the low sky. The streets, rattling
with old city trams during the day, now witness a different
reverberation: O-STAV-KA! or Resign!, the citizens shout,
waving posters, angry picket signs and dummies of the
people who are supposed to represent them.

Early last year, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov resigned

amid anti-austerity demonstrations. The biggest protests in
15 years, they were attributed to worsening living standards
and a sudden hike in electricity prices, but they took a
distinctly anti-government turn after the widely reported
self-immolation of 36-year-old Plamen Goranov. Though he
was one of six people to set themselves on re in Bulgaria
in less than a month, Goranov, who did so on 20 February
in the town square of Varna as an explicit protest against
the citys long-term mayor, drew comparison with Mohamed
Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor whose self-immolation
became a catalyst for the Arab Spring, and Jan Palach, the
Czech history and politics student who set himself on re
in response to the crushing of the Prague Spring. Hailing
Goranov as a symbol of the countrys profound political
crisis, crowds mobilised in Soa, Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad, Ruse,
Sliven and Varna and, unappeased by Borisovs sacking of

86-89_FEAT_Bulgaria Protests.indd 86

Photography by Sava Chapanov

Known more for their images, videos and improvised

happenings than for speeches or manifestos, they are
among the millions who, since 2011, have marched
and occupied spaces everywhere from Egypt to the US,
Russia, Spain, Brazil and Turkey. Against the backdrop
of global protest, events in Bulgaria have seemed to
pale in signicance, receiving very little international
coverage. Unlike the brutal repression in Taksim Square,
the militaristic theatre in Cairo and, most recently, the
mass demonstrations tear-gassed and stun-grenaded
in Kiev, the daily rallies that began last year have been
remarkably peaceful. Described by some as an example of
what the Serbian activist Srdja Popovi calls laughtivism,
to outsiders the protests might even resemble a summer
pastime for smartphone-wielding middle-class Bulgarians,
complete with young children, pets and plenty of cold beer.
Yet for this notoriously apathetic Balkan nation and recent
EU member, the events of the last several months mark a
major social and cultural leap, an expression of the deep
discontent that has been building since the promised End
of History two decades ago.

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his finance minister or his promises to slash prices, toppled

his government. I cant look at a Parliament surrounded
by barricades, he said, explaining that it was better to step
down than rely on police truncheons to protect ourselves
from the people.
Taking office in 2009, he had been greeted as a
saviour, promising to sweep Bulgaria clean of corruption
and organised crime. A former firefighter and bodyguard
to dignitaries such as the late communist dictator Todor
Zhivkov and the ex-king Simeon Saxe-Coburg, Borisov,
with his formidable physical presence and straight-talking
approach, was a textbook populist leader, wooing the press
and the people with new highways, ribbon-cuttings and
highly publicised arrests. Over time, though, cracks began
to show. Some of the secret recordings of illicit phone calls
his government released backfired, revealing that Borisov,
like his predecessors, was offering protection for some
shady schemes even as he targeted others. There were
allegations of media censorship and ties with mobsters
known as mutri or thick-necks and soon both he
and his centre-right party GERB (Citizens for European
Development of Bulgaria) were widely discredited.
His replacement, Plamen Oresharski, was elected as
a supposed antidote; his cabinet was met with a kind of
hopeful neutrality. Oresharski, with his serious, reliable air,
is best known as one of the architects of the currency board
imposed on Bulgaria in 1997 as part of an IMF programme
to save the country from currency collapse and 1,000 per
cent inflation. He had consolidated his hardcore neoliberal
pedigree as finance minister in the 2000s, and was
considered just the man to fix the economy. Yet it was
Oresharski who, in mid-June, fresh from his election at the
head of a Socialist-backed government, ignited an entirely
new and significant surge of protest. The match was lit
by his decision, announced without debate in the National
Assembly, to appoint the media magnate Delyan Peevski as
head of the State Agency for National Security ().
This corpulent, improbably antagonistic-looking man,
the 33-year-old son of Irena Krusteva, the former head
of the national lottery, is largely known for his murky
connections. After becoming head of Bulgarias large sea
port at Varna during his second year at university, he went

86-89_FEAT_Bulgaria Protests.indd 88

on to be fired from a post as deputy minister for disaster

management over allegations of corruption at the tender
age of 25; Peevski then began a notably passive spell in
parliament, where he missed 92 per cent of legislative
sessions between 2009 and 2013. He went in for crude
threats against parliamentary opponents, enjoyed close
ties with state prosecutors and the media, and had no
intelligence experience whatsoever. Handing Peevski the
guardianship of Bulgarias internal and external security
a role that now included responsibility for organised crime
felt positively Orwellian. In an interview, he made it clear
he was keen to punish: Whoever was in the wrong will feel
the full severity of the law.
In the context of Bulgarias recent history, this
was hardly news. If UK voters are still capable of being
scandalised by revelations of corruption, in Bulgaria, it
has seeped into the fabric of everyday life. After years
of repeated and increasingly flagrant transgressions,
the public has come to take the abuse of power as a
given. The latest bribes, embezzlements and smear
campaigns have become permanent conversation fillers,
along with pensions, May graduation balls and pickled
vegetables for winter. So when, just hours after the Peevski
announcement, thousands of people took to the streets,
organising via social media with the hashtag #withme
(literally dance with me), it marked a sharp turn for a
civic consciousness long stuck between banality and dread.
Oresharski revoked the appointment five days later but,
for him and his shaky, month-old government, the die was
cast. The price citizens demanded was their resignation.
Perhaps Bulgarians are growing tired of strongmen
and saviours. For hundreds of years, the country was,
to use Jonathan Franzens description of Lithuania in The
Corrections, passed along between powers like a much
recycled wedding present. In the incoherent architecture
of the capital, Sofia, its early 20th-century Viennesestyle facades plastered with elegant wreaths and lyres
cohabiting with featureless Soviet concrete, you can read
the signs of the five-century Ottoman rule, the San Stefano
Peace Treaty of 1878, the USSRs invasion, the post-war
communist takeover.
The post-communist anarchy of the 1990s brought

22/01/2014 16:31

Caught

off

guard,

the

government rst tried to ignore

with it a creeping individualism and stoked the fantasy of

a charismatic individual who might transform Bulgaria into
a true European country through sheer force of will. In
these years, wealth concentrated in the hands of the few
and any meaningful distinction between the private and
public sectors disappeared in a labyrinth of bureaucracy
and opaque corporate accounting. Luxury cars, bleached
hair and monogrammed bags appeared everywhere and the
phenomenon of chalga, a pornied form of pop-folk music,
seemed to penetrate all corners of the culture, embraced by
national television channels and public gures. Throughout
the dejected years of the transition, the novelist Theodora
Dimova writes, the ruling classes managed to eliminate
hope and nurture a generation clogged with chalga.
Whoever doesnt like chalga, emigrate! Some emigrated
abroad, others within themselves. Pop culture glamorised
easy money and shady deals, while constant transgressions
by both left and right induced a deep political apathy that
seems only now to show signs of lifting. Its no wonder the
protesters do not organise themselves along party lines.
For one thing, the current government is a paradoxical
coalition of the Socialist Party, their traditional backer the
MRF (who represent Bulgarias large Turkish minority) and
the far-right nationalists ATAKA (attack), led by a political
provocateur with a history of bashing the MRF and storming
mosques in broad daylight. Whats more, the only other
party in parliament is Borisovs GERB.

the demonstrations and censor

the coverage, hoping it would all
TAN K/89

just go away. Instead, it grew

government, which people know from experience would
do little to change the status quo. The social theorist Julia
Kristeva, who criticised Bulgarias lack of an aesthetic of the
public sphere in her 2000 book The Crisis of the European
Subject, may have been impressed by the events of 23
October, when students at Soa University (inspired in
part by the style of Occupy) reclaimed its public space,
bringing classes to a halt to proclaim a moral revolution.
Starting with around 50 students in one of the main lecture
halls, the numbers grew and the gesture quickly gained
public recognition and support. The students explicitly
dissociated themselves from all political parties, instead
organising workshops and street demonstrations that aimed
to rethink what a desirable future might look like. We are
awake! proclaimed the banners hung from the university
walls, the slogan of those the nation has come to know as
the early risers. Against the paid counter-protesters and
fake students who have tried to discredit them, as well as
the attempted invasions by ultra-nationalist government
supporters and other thugs, the student occupation
managed to sustain a fragile balance, preserving complexity
and ambivalence. We are not paid to protest, a student
representative said. We are paying, with our faces, with
our free time, with our work time, with our youth, so we
can possibly have a future here.

in size, boldness and creativity.

Caught off guard, the government rst tried to ignore

the demonstrations and censor the coverage, hoping it
would all just go away. Instead, it grew in size, boldness
and creativity: ash mobs of clowns carried brooms
and signs saying Lets sweep out the trash; a young
ballerina danced on the yellow cobblestones of the National
Assembly; a diver emerged from the sea bearing a banner
that read OSTAVKA; on 14 July, a crowd thanked the French
ambassador for his support by staging a reenactment of
Delacroixs Liberty Leading the People. This vibrancy and
diversity of expression has been a dening feature of the
protests and the new atmosphere they have created. On
the 40th day, demonstrators trapped lawmakers inside
the parliament buildings for eight hours: when the police
loaded MPs onto a white bus, intending to drive through the
crowds, the demonstrators threw up makeshift barricades
of torn-out paving stones, trash cans and potted plants
from nearby restaurants.
Police repression was stepped up following that
incident, but the government also began trying other
tactics to undermine the demonstrations. They orchestrated
clumsy counter-protests, bribing and mobilising a few
hundred people at a time, many of whom seemed oblivious
to what was going on and cheerfully admitted they had
been paid for their trip to Soa. They also cast aspersions
on the allegiances of the demonstrators, branding them
middle-class Soros-oids in thrall to Washington and
Brussels. It was an attempt once more to conjure up
what the lm and theatre director Yavor Gardev calls the
mythical-astrological idea of Bulgaria as a little planet
surrounded by two bigger ones the East and the West,
which are magnetically pulling her on both sides. Despite
their best efforts, the fact remains that no counter-protest
has ever reached the number of people gathering on the
streets of their own accord almost every night since June.
While the mantra Resign! has been the loudest
message heard at the protests, their aims have grown
broader and deeper than the overthrow of this one

86-89_FEAT_Bulgaria Protests.indd 89

The Soa occupation inspired others, of the National

Academy of Theatre and Film, the National Art Academy,
the New Bulgarian, Technical, Plovdiv and Veliko Turnovo
universities, as well as a number of demonstrations of
solidarity abroad. More importantly, though, the students
were able to forge links with the crowds in the streets.
Just as the protests were beginning to diminish at the
end of the summer, the student occupation brought them
thundering back to life: crowds marched in support of
the young people ghting for Bulgaria instead of leaving
it, as thousands have so far. The head of the Theatre
Guild closed all theatres for several days in solidarity with
the students, while actors and artists on one occasion recreated a mass funeral procession from Alexander Morfovs
play Life is Beautiful, walking under the slogan: Lets bury
the morals of Bulgarian politicians.
Some criticise this protest movement for its lack of
clear political goals, but as Kristeva said of the student
strikes at the Sorbonne in 68: to think is to revolt, to be
in the movement of meaning, as well as that of the street.
Rejecting the coercive logic of tactical voting, of accepting
the lesser evil, the student occupation has helped open
up a new collective discourse. By their reclamation of
public space, they have physically rejected the privatising,
individualising impulse of the 90s. Simply put, the protests
mark a real desire for change. More than 60 per cent of the
country say they are in sympathy with the protesters. So
far, they have had one undeniable effect: they have swept
away the entrenched apathy on which Bulgarias corrupt
political class has rested easy for so long.

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