Kristian Shkvarek before FACTS: I wonder what the vision of each party is for the future of Bulgaria!?

Who tells us what in the election campaign, which is in full swing. But what do we hear from her, what do we remember, what impresses us… And if there is no such thing, why… Political analyst Christian Shkvarek from the “Conservative Society” Foundation spoke to FAKTI.

- Mr. Shkvarek, we are already in the middle of the campaign for the “2 in 1“ on June 9, and what can we remember from it. Can we even remember anything…
- Very few things. Basically, we can't remember anything because there is no campaign. I don't remember such a sluggish campaign in recent years. Now periodically we have to remember that there is a campaign, because I forget about it. So far, whenever we've been on a campaign, in those 30 days of a campaign, there's been something interesting. There is none at the moment. The campaign is lackluster mainly due to the fact that there is no very serious political clash of ideas.

- And we constantly hear how bad others are and how bad others were?
- Exactly. At the moment there is nothing meaningful in the campaign, only “they are bad”. And look now here we are going to put up a billboard with one of the opponents who are caricatured, some recordings have come out. Yes, it's true that these records are quite egregious, because they talk about unregulated cash, obsession with services and so on, but, at the end of the day, let's remember that the records are from last year. They were made a year ago.

- But now is the convenient time to let them go…
- We're on a campaign, aren't we? But, look, these records tell us nothing about the idea, the direction, the vision, the future of Bulgaria. Who offers us now, finally, something reasonable, clear what a political campaign should be. What is a political campaign - a clash of visions, of ideas. Left parties come out and say: “This is our vision for a left-wing future…“ The right-wing come out and say: “This is our right-wing vision…“ Out come the liberals, conservatives, etc. It should be purely formal. I am currently wondering what the vision of each party is for the future of Bulgaria!? They don't tell me what the vision for Bulgaria is. They tell me why others are worse than them, and here and there when they decide to tell us some vision, it is, to be honest, a string of props and practically learned phrases. In fact, they tell us - our vision for the future is to be good, and we will be good if it is not bad, but it will be bad if others are in power. And what is it… There are no ideological ideas. Let's take as a parallel what is happening in the States. There, the primary campaign has already begun. There we see a clash of two visions - the Biden administration with its ultra-liberal vision, with the ultra-progressive left vision of completely open borders, through which 10 million people have passed in a year, for the green, etc. And on the other side, we have the other vision as an alternative - the conservative vision of closing Trump's borders, more sovereignty, etc. It's kind of a clash of visas, although they throw mud at each other there as well. In principle, it is normal for politicians to throw mud at each other. They do it in America too, but we have two visions there - one is liberal and the other is conservative. And what do we have in Bulgaria - only mud. In Bulgaria, there is no clash of two distinctly different crystallized political visas. This is why people will not go to vote. The politicians do not offer them anything.

- And at the same time, the topic of Ukraine continues to divide us, because we are already hearing specific, rather extreme statements?
- The issue of Ukraine initially divided our society, and that is a fact. Bulgaria is perhaps the most divided country of all the members of the European Union. Bulgaria, Slovakia and Greece are probably the most divided countries on this topic in the EU, because there is no consensus. The bad thing is that politicians always take an extreme position on this topic - in one or the other direction of the political terrain. We have some people who are 100% absolutely radically supportive – even along Komsomol lines, the Euro-Atlantic line. On the other side, we have people who accept the extreme positions of the Russian side. I lack some kind of moderate, sober, pragmatic political line, which, I think, most people in Bulgaria share and want. And the politicians decide to either be at one extreme or the other on this topic.

- And do we remember that we will also go to vote for the European elections on June 9. Does it appear somewhere in our minds that there are things that Bulgaria can do in the next mandate of the European Parliament?
- This is the biggest damage from early elections in Bulgaria. It is the total covering up and neglect of the European topic and the European elections. This is very unfortunate. In general, national elections are more important for a country than European ones, if you have not entered into a spiral where you have national elections every three months.

But even when you have national elections every three months, suddenly the European elections become much more important because they are once every five years.

In Bulgaria, we have national elections every six months. We kind of didn't care. And it's a problem that the European elections – to a lesser or greater extent, were totally nullified. And Europe is really at a crossroads right now. The European elections will decide many things. One of them is that there is an opportunity for politics to return to the European Parliament for the first time. Until now, there was no politics in the European Parliament. In the European Parliament in the last 20 years, there was a consensus of the center with the left, and there was no talk of politics. Everyone was lined up in a sanitary cordon, everything was decided bureaucratically, and now there is an opportunity to return to politics and have a left-right, conservative-liberal clash again. But we in Bulgaria do not talk about such a thing, and we do not talk because we are dealing with a dirty campaign, with mud and records.