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Gains by Far Right Prompt Soul-Searching in Bulgaria

26 10 2006  Volen Siderov's strong showing in presidential poll reflects upsurge in discontent with complacent establishment.

By Ekaterina Petrova in Sofia (Balkan Insight, 26 Oct 06)

Almost 600,000 Bulgarians supported the leader of the far-right Ataka party, Volen Siderov, on October 22, ensuring he will be Georgi Purvanov's only challenger in the second round of presidential elections next Sunday.

The first round put Purvanov, the incumbent Socialist president, way in the lead with 64 per cent of votes cast, followed by Siderov at 21.5 per cent.

As voter participation was low and did not meet the threshold of 50 per cent, the two candidates must go head-to-head in spite of the huge gap between their votes.

The forecasts of the election outcome alarmed commentators who claimed Siderov's gains showed Bulgaria was succumbing to nationalism and xenophobia. But now most experts say his showing was mostly an anti-establishment gesture.

Siderov first appeared on the political scene before last year's parliamentary elections at the head of his new, hard-line nationalist party Ataka.

Campaigning largely on hostility to Bulgaria's substantial ethnic and religious minorities, Ataka received 8.9 per cent of votes and won 21 seats in parliament. The number of seats has since dwindled to 12, however, due to some Ataka parliamentary deputies disassociating themselves from the party and others who were expelled as a result of scandals involving the obstruction of justice and accusations of pedophilia.

Since then, Siderov has softened his rhetoric with a view to winning over a broader section of the electorate outside his hard core of racist, xenophobic supporters.

In the latest campaign, he reduced outward attacks on minorities to concentrate on denouncing the common political priorities of the big parties, such as EU and NATO membership and the closure of out-of-date reactors at the Kozloduy nuclear power plant.

Racist comments were not entirely absent from his campaign, however. He pledged to scrap the news programme in Turkish from Bulgarian National Television, for example. And responding to accusations, he stated that he did not wish to turn Roma into soap (as the Nazis did), but joked that he would send soap bars to be used as intended to Roma-populated areas.

Although his opponents and the ethnic minorities in question do not believe he has made any meaningful change to his attitudes, analysts say his milder campaign attracted people with anti-establishment views who until a few months ago would have felt uncomfortable voting for him.

In a televised debate on the results last Sunday, political scientist Ognian Minchev said he saw the large turnout for Siderov as a protest vote against the system.

Many analysts agreed, saying most of those who backed Siderov did not plump for him as a fascist but as a figure challenging the status quo and "the system".

Andrey Raychev, of the BBSS Gallup International polling agency, agreed. He told Balkan Insight only a minority of the voters opting for Siderov were hard-core nationalists. The rest wanted to make a protest vote against the government. "There aren't half a million fascists in Bulgaria," he said.

Gallup's exit polls showed many of Siderov's voters were, in fact, followers of centrist democratic parties. Ten per cent of the supporters of the United Democratic Forces, UDF, voted for Siderov as did 22 per cent of supporters of a newly formed centre-right party, GERB.

Those statistics shed light on another factor explaining Siderov's gains - the lack of an appealing non-Socialist alternative.

While a number of democratic parties united around a common candidate, their nomination, the relatively elderly and unknown Nedelcho Beronov, was a poor choice.

Beronov came third in the poll, taking fewer than ten per cent of the votes - less than half the number that voted for Siderov.

A third reason why the vote for Siderov cannot be interpreted entirely as a vote supporting racism and xenophobia, but rather as an anti-establishment vote, is that it is not without precedent.

Bogomil Bonev in 2001 and George Ganchev in 1996 were both populist nationalists who did unexpectedly well in presidential races. However, neither made it to the second round of the elections.

This makes Siderov's case more interesting and disturbing. Many observers have admitted it is a warning to the establishment concerning a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo among many Bulgarians. Many find the transition to democracy has taken too long without yielding fast and tangible results and they see themselves being worse off economically and excluded from the democratic process.

"In a society, in which there are so many excluded and faithless people, who think of themselves as losers... these people's thesis is, 'There are bad people, who took our life away and we want to get it back.'," said anthropologist Haralan Aleksandrov, commenting on the vote for Ataka in the
parliamentary elections in an interview for online news-site Vsekiden.com.

In the second round, significant groups, such as members of ethnic minorities and hard-core democrat supporters, face a tough dilemma, choosing between a former communist and a man of the far right.

"It is impossible for me to call on my supporters to vote for Siderov," said Bulgaria's former president and head of the UDF Petar Stoyanov.

He said such an action would negate his entire political career, a view that echoes the feelings of many naturally centrist voters.

On the other hand, Stoyanov said he could not encourage his supporters to vote for the Socialist president either.

Members of minority groups face a similar headache. Metody Stoilov, of the Roma council, Kupate, said he would vote for Siderov if he removed racist and extremist elements from his agenda.

His appeals for changes to the status quo had registered favourably with many Roma he added. But as matters stood, he would have to vote "with disgust" for the "lesser evil" of Purvanov in the second round.


Ekaterina Petrova is a BIRN Bulgaria project coordinator. Daniel Asparuhov, intern at BIRN Bulgaria, contributed to this article. Balkan Insight is BIRN's online publication.