FORUM

In Joseph Heller's timeless masterpiece, Catch 22, there is a minor character named Major Major Major Major. Major Major Major Major Major has a father, whom Heller describes as a "God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist... who advocates thrift and hard work, and disapproves of loose women who turn him down." Catch 22 was a very popular book in Communist Bulgaria because those who read it did not have to be very imaginative to see the obvious parallels with real life this side of the Iron Curtain.

Predictably, the 27 October snap ballot – the 7th in three years – failed to elect a viable parliament capable of producing a long-term government. With a turnout of just over 38 percent – slightly higher than the pervious election in June 2024 – it took about 10,700 votes for an MP to get elected.

As Bulgaria is heading for a seventh snap election in just three years, two events mark the month of August, which is traditionally seen as a holiday season for working Bulgarians. Whilst Sofia has been going through repeated heat waves, the Constitutional Court judges repealed most of the much-hailed but apparently ill-thought-out Constitutional reforms passed last year in a rare show of agreement between Boyko Borisov's GERB, the DPS, or Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and the PP-DB-DSB, or Changes Continued-Yes Bulgaria-Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria.

As the seventh general election in two years seems unavoidable, Bulgaria is faced with yet another uncertainty. Will the Constitutional Court approve or reject the changes to the basic law pushed through at the end of 2023 at the insistence of the now besmirched PP-DB-DSB, or Changes Continued-Yes Bulgaria-Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria, but accepted with the support of other political parties, including Boyko Borisov's GERB and the Turkish-dominated DPS, or Movement for Rights and Freedoms, that the PP-DB-DSB had been representing as their chief political foes?

As ballot counters concluded the relatively easy task of turning out the record-low number of votes in the 9 June general election, some unpleasant truths emerged. Politicians and analysts of all shades and hues will have to stomach them unless they want to consign themselves to the dustbin of history. Here are the most important ones.

The fourth iteration of the OPEN BUZLUDZHA festival is scheduled to kick off on 8 August and will last for three nights/four days. A plethora of local and international club scene bands will converge on the lawn beneath the controversial former Communist Party House Monument on Mount Buzludzha, informally referred to as the UFO. These include Wickeda, Hayes & Y, Kerana and the Cosmonauts, Two Cities One World, Funkilicious, Heptagram and others.

Тhe overwhelming majority of Bulgarians who will go to the polls in June to elect their next National Assembly will do so with one all-pervasive sentiment. Disgust. They are disgusted at the incompetence and hypocrisy of the former rulers, the markedly pro-Western, liberal grouping of the CC-DB, or Changes Continued-Democratic Bulgaria. They are disgusted by the Monkey-See-Monkey-Do mentality of their pious followers, who like to introduce themselves as "smart and beautiful" intellectuals.

"We are fascists, we burn Arabs": the youngsters start chanting as soon as they emerge from the metro station and leave the perimeter of its security cameras. Their voices grow stronger with each step in the dark streets of the relatively central Sofia neighbourhood. Then they gradually disperse, still ecstatic after a protest provoked by an alleged attack by a group of Arab migrants on Bulgarian teens on Vitosha Boulevard.

In the 1990s and early 2000s Bulgaria, a former East bloc country, was an enthusiastic applicant to join both NATO and the EU. Twenty years later the initial enthusiasm has waned. There are now parties with sizeable, albeit still politically insignificant, support that demand a Bulgarexit, first from NATO and then from the EU. Their declared "love" for Russia is being echoed even by people who approve of NATO, the EU and the West in general.

Тo understand the current predicament of the Changes Continued political party, one of whose leaders, Kiril Petkov, was prime minister in 2021-2022, one needs to consider the characteristically complicated background.

Kiril Petkov and his mate, Asen Vasilev, are both Harvard-educated economists who returned to Bulgaria and started their own businesses. Their ascend into politics was somewhat unexpected. They were put forward by... President Rumen Radev.