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P h o t o g r a p h y

b y

S a v a

C h a p a

n o v

It’s 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, filling Tsarigradsko Boulevard all the way to Sofia

University, enveloping the Alexander Nevsky cathedral, its

golden domes buttressing the low sky. The streets, rattlingwith 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.

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 significance, 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 Popović 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.

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 fire in Bulgaria

in less than a month, Goranov, who did so on 20 Februaryin the town square of Varna as an explicit protest against

the city’s 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 fire

in response to the crushing of the Prague Spring. Hailing

Goranov as a symbol of the country’s profound political

crisis, crowds mobilised in Sofia, Plovdiv, Blagoevgrad, Ruse,

Sliven and Varna and, unappeased by Borisov’s sacking of

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his nance minister or his promises to slash prices, toppledhis government. “I can’t 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 ofce in 2009, he had been greeted as a

saviour, promising to sweep Bulgaria clean of corruption

and organised crime. A former reghter 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 backred, 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 ination. He had consolidated his hardcore neoliberal

pedigree as nance minister in the 2000s, and was

considered just the man to “x” 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 signicant surge of protest. The match was litby 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 (ДАНС).

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 Bulgaria’s large sea

port at Varna during his second year at university, he went

on to be red from a post as deputy minister for disastermanagement 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 Bulgaria’s 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 Bulgaria’s 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 agrant 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 llers,

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 #ДАНСwithme

(literally “dance with me”), it marked a sharp turn for a

civic consciousness long stuck between banality and dread.

Oresharski revoked the appointment ve 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 Franzen’s description of Lithuania in The

Corrections, “passed along between powers like a muchrecycled wedding present”. In the incoherent architecture

of the capital, Soa, its early 20th-century Viennese-

style facades plastered with elegant wreaths and lyres

cohabiting with featureless Soviet concrete, you can read

the signs of the ve-century Ottoman rule, the San Stefano

Peace Treaty of 1878, the USSR’s invasion, the post-war

communist takeover.

The post-communist anarchy of the 1990s brought

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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, bleachedhair and monogrammed bags appeared everywhere and the

phenomenon of chalga, a pornified form of pop-folk music,

seemed to penetrate all corners of the culture, embraced by

national television channels and public figures. “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 doesn’t 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. It’s no wonder the

protesters do not organise themselves along party lines.

For one thing, the current government is a paradoxical

coalition of the Social ist Party, their traditional backer the

MRF (who represent Bulgaria’s large Turkish minority) and

the far-right nationalists ATAKA (“attack”), led by a politicalprovocateur with a history of bashing the MRF and storming

mosques in broad daylight. What’s more, the only other

party in parliament is Borisov’s GERB.

Caught off guard, the government first tried to ignore

the demonstrations and censor the coverage, hoping it

would all just go away. Instead, it grew in size, boldness

and creativity: flash mobs of clowns carried brooms

and signs saying “Let’s 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

Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. This vibrancy and

diversity of expression has been a defining 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 Sofia”. 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 film and theatre director Yavor Gardev calls the

“mythical-astrological idea of Bulgaria as a little planetsurrounded 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

government, which people know from experience would

do little to change the status quo. The social theorist Julia

Kristeva, who criticised Bulgaria’s 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 Sofia 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 aimedto 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.”

The Sofia 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 studentswere 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 fighting 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 re-

created a mass funeral procession from Alexander Morfov’s

play Life is Beautiful , walking under the slogan: “Let’s 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 acceptingthe 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 Bulgaria’s corrupt

political class has rested easy for so long.

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