The Nobel-prize winning author Elias Canetti was born in the Bulgarian city of Russe on the Danube in 1905 and would have had quite a few things to say about the protests in Sofia. Better known ironically (thanks to his own autobiographical efforts) as one of British novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s many lovers, his “Crowds and Power” (1960) vies with Le Bon’s as the classic treatise on the subject. The book - a strange mixture of anthropology and social psychology and now, understandably, enjoying a new lease of life - warned of the unpredictable ebb and flow of the crowd. It is, most definitely, not a Marxist take on the subject – for which one should turn to criminologist Matt Clement’s “A People’s History of Riot, Protest and the Law – the Sound of the Crowd” (2016)
Vlad Mitev is a young Bulgarian journalist who also lives in Russe and has a trilingual Bridge of Friendship blog which covers political and cultural developments on both sides of that last section of the river Danube. He’s also editor of the Romanian section of "Baricada" , a leftist journal based in Sofia which boasts Bulgarian, Polish and Romanian writers. He and I worked together on an early draft of this piece before deciding to focus on what we each felt we knew best. I’m also grateful for the insights I’ve gained over the years from Daniela, my Romanian companion and conspirator,
Ralf Dahrendorf was a famous German sociologist/UK statesman who wrote in 1990 an extended public letter first published under the title “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” and then expanded as “Reflections on the Revolution of our Time”. In it he made the comment that it would take
·
one
or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in the recently
liberated countries of central Europe;
·
maybe
five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy; and
·
15
to 20 years to create the rule of law.
·
some
two generations to create a functioning civil society there.
What had in
1989 seemed a bloody Revolution in Romania was later exposed as more of
a simple regime change. Personnel and systems remained in place and it was to
be 1996 - with the election of Emil Constantinescu as President - before new
winds started to challenge the old systems and structures of power. By then the
scions of the country's privileged families were being inculcated in the
pro-market celebratory doctrines that pass for education in American Business
Schools; and the country's (strong) intelligentsia had spent several years
quaffing at Friedrich Hayek's fountain.
Privatisation was at last allowed to
let rip – with the local oligarchs soon becoming indistinguishable from the
politicians.
When Bulgaria’s PM Ivan Kostov was
asked why crony capitalism was flourishing under his rule, his revealing
comments was
“Bulgaria is a small country. We
are all cousins”
Eastern Europe as a whole was offered a deadly deal which has
almost destroyed these countries – almost 2 million Bulgarians and
Romanians prop up the British and German economies; Bulgaria has the unenviable
position of losing its population at a faster rate than any other country in
the world - and Romania is not far behind. And the pensioners who are
expected to exist on a monthly pension of less than 200 euros a month – when
the prices in the shops are at western level.
Austrian and
Italian companies have taken over the jewels of the Bulgarian and Romanian
timber, banking and agribusiness sectors after the massive privatisation which
was made a condition of their membership of the EU and NATO.
That last has meant of
course militarisation, high expenditures on military procurement and reduced
social spending. Bulgaria recently concluded a deal for American fighter
aircraft at a cost of 2 billion dollars – placing it at the top of the global
table for increased military spending since 2010 – with a 167% increase
(Romania is at 150%)
The Bulgarian protests
But it is
the EC Structural Funds with their hundreds of billions of euros which lie
behind the ongoing street protests in Sofia - directed generally against the
country's systemic corruption and, specifically, against Prime Minister
Borisov (who used to be the bodyguard of first the ex-dictator Zhivkov and
then PM King Simeon II) as well as the Chief Prosecutor Ivan Geshev - whose
raid on the offices of popular President Radev in July raised big questions.
Unlike
previous street protests in Sofia, this one has attracted wider support – for
example from a previous Justice Minister, Hristo Ivanov who launched a mock
incursion on the Black Sea home of one of the country’s political oligarchs
The incident transformed Ivanov’s
image from detached intellectual to maverick politician setting the terms of
public debate, and his centre-right Democratic Bulgaria coalition
doubled its support in the polls. “This was not simply the PR action of the
year but of the decade,” said Petar Cholakov, a political analyst and
sociologist from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
The two
countries separated by the River Danube don't usually have a great deal to do
with one another - one is strongly in the EU/Atlantic Alliance camp - the other's
150-year-old ties with Russia still reverberate. But, in recent years, Romania
(at least in western
eyes) has made
significant progress in fighting corruption - measured at least in terms of the
number of politicians and ex-Ministers it has managed to put in jail. When
Bulgarian activists began to call this out, the power structure tried to defuse
the situation by appointing a crony as Prosecutor-General. This is a position
which, unlike in Romania, has never been the subject of any reform.
Vlad Mitev’s
recent Open Democracy article Bulgarian Protests - battle over anti-corruption gives some
of the background to the Sofia protests
The Romanian anti-corruption formula
was popular in Bulgaria until 2017-2018. Romanian anti-corruption had gained
its fame under the leadership of the former chief prosecutor of the National
Anti-corruption Directorate (DNA) Laura Kövesi, now chief prosecutor of the
European Public Prosecutor’s Office.
As Romanian Chief prosecutor from
2013 to 2018, she presided over numerous arrests of politicians, widely
reported in the international press. The “Romanian model of anti-corruption”
was lauded in the western media as an exemplary model for delivering justice
and building the rule of law. The model of anti-corruption based on a powerful
Chief Prosecutor’s office thus came to be seen in Bulgaria as a path towards a
European standard of living. The Bulgarian middle class seemed to envy their
Romanian counterparts...
But a
subsequent article by Mitev in
“Baricada” laid more emphasis on the class nature evident in
the protests – which the western media has totally failed to pick up -
It
is interesting to note that in the earlier wave of anti-oligarchic protests in
Bulgaria in 2013 the protesters were called by media and society “the beautiful
and the clever ones”, which was a direct reference to the narcissism of their
representatives’ and to the abyss that divides them from the “ugly” and
“stupid” masses. Romania has an almost exact notion of the same type: “the
beautiful and the free youth”, which gets abbreviated as “Tefelists” (TFL –
tineri frumoşi şi liberi – beautiful and free youth).
These
are important signals that important parts of the overall population feel
distant and maybe even ethically superior to these protesting elites, who in
turn believe that it is they who hold the ethical higher ground. And these
notions have been used by politicians in a divide and conquer manner.
What was
imported from Romania was the idea of an unrestrained Chief Prosecutor which
suited Bulgaria’s new man Geshev down to the ground – as Mihai Evans explains in
a recent Open Democracy article.
As
the system is currently constituted there are simply no checks and balances
that can rein in the conduct of the Bulgarian Prosecutor General, a position
which is largely in the political gift of the government. The holder of this
office has effective command of the entire judicial system and can stop any
investigation, including a hypothetical one against himself. This has resulted
in conduct that reached a nadir in a shocking series of events which saw a
senior prosecutor murdered after making strongly worded criticisms of
the then Prosecutor General. This appalling episode has never been satisfactory
cleared up by investigators or the legal system. The family of the murdered man
took a case, Kolevi v Bulgaria, to the European Court of
Human Rights whose ruling was that Bulgaria must engage in extensive reforms of
the prosecutors office.
Over
a period of more than a decade, largely coinciding with the governments of
Borisov, it has failed to do so. As a result, as Radosveta Vassileva, a fellow at University
College, London’s Faculty of Law argues: “Bulgaria is permanently torn by
scandals regarding non-random distribution of case files, abuses of judges and
prosecutors who resist political orders, purposeful destruction of evidence by
authorities etc.”. In recent years Bulgaria has been repeatedly convicted
of violations
of Article 6 of
the European Convention on Human Rights for failing to ensure the rights of the
accused. The Specialised Court for Organised Crime, a parallel system of courts
ostensibly established to combat corruption have failed to convict a single
politician (in
contrast to Romania where dozens have been imprisoned, including the
leader of the ruling Social Democrat Party last year). Legal
scholars have accused both countries of failing to provide fair trials.
The Sofia protesters’
demand of a reform to the Bulgarian constitution (with the chief prosecutor’s
prerogatives being curbed, the political influence over the judicial system
curtailed and the judiciary strengthened) certainly suggests a continuing
degree of faith in Bulgarian institutions or at least in their capacity to
reform and be held accountable.
Pre Covid Hopes of
“Normality”
"For a
normal Romania" was the slogan used by the campaign of
the ex-Mayor of the Transylvanian city of Sibiu in last autumn's elections
as he fought to retain the Presidency he had surprisingly grabbed in 2015 from
the jaws of defeat. The slogan expressed the dreams of many - not least the
millions of younger Romanians (and Bulgarians) forced to emigrate in search of
that dream.
Street
protests in both countries are nothing new - although only in Romania have they
succeeded in recent years in toppling governments. A
so-called Social Democratic (PSD) government fell in 2015 as a result of a
deadly fire in a Bucharest nightclub which exposed the scandalously lax regulations
sustained by the greasing of hands.
Another
scandal which engulfed Romania last summer started with the murder of a teenager whose terrified phone-call to the police was totally ignored.
The revelation of the scale of the collusion between the Secret Service,
prosecutors and the Anti-Corruption Agency in the country (a veritable Deep
State) eventually led to the collapse of that PSD government as well - and
the re-election in the subsequent Presidential election of the slow-witted but
polarising Transylvanian Klaus Johannis
Bulgaria and
Romania may have joined the EU in 2007 after a bit of a hiccup but they both
still operate under a judicial cloud in the form of The Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) which
subjects each country to an annual check of its legal and judicial health.
Neither Bulgaria nor Romania are happy with the continued EU scrutiny but have
at least managed to avoid the threat of sanctions which continues to hang
over Hungary and Poland. And both countries have, largely, managed post-1989 to
escape the right-wing virus to which they were exposed in the interwar period.
For that we should all be profoundly grateful.
But neither
country has been able to shake off the legacy of its past - which is much
longer than just the half-century of communist influence. The
Ottoman Empire had several centuries to engineer
human souls – with the Greek
Phanariots being given a measure of licence in Romania to exploit the locals
whereas the Bulgarians lived under the direct yoke of the Ottomans.
In that respect, Dahrendorf was a bit optimistic in 1990 in suggesting that it would it take only 20 years to embed the Rule of Law and 2 generations (say 50 years) for civil society to be properly functioning!
I’ll continue this post later
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