From the typical skepticism, through "he'll tell me" - there are a number of reasons why Bulgaria cannot resemble Orban's Hungary or Fico's Slovakia. Ivaylo Noizi Tsvetkov lists them:
It is no coincidence that I am not starting with Belarus, which is still practically in the USSR. I'll start with Robert Fico - as if the latest bad European example of a hidden creeping authoritarianism with a strong Putin gravity, formally disguised as a liberal democracy.
Of course, Orbán should also be present in this conversation, but we'll leave that for another time, because modern Hungary is a separate, very special and complex case.
Everyone knows about the frog and the slowly boiling water. The cliché is appropriate here too - we can even build on it and talk about the gradual Slovak metanoia (change of mental attitudes and social mores) of the majority, albeit in the heart of the European Union. And in this case, the fact that beautiful Bratislava is a few kilometers from former imperial Vienna is somewhat irrelevant.
Slovakia is not that different from Bulgaria
Slovakia is not that different from Bulgaria in terms of socio-political stratification of a former communist state - and there is a pronounced urban pro-Western minority, some 35 to 40% inexplicable Russian-Soviet-nostalgics and a "gray zone" of the majority, whose attention is mainly engaged in the question of how to push through to a salary. The urban minority, of course, periodically gets angry at Fico's state, which is gradually boiling the frog of the majority, taking away freedoms - sometimes more perfidiously, sometimes with the metaphorical excavator.
One of their latest cases (and causes) is related to the wholesale closure of state cultural institutes - under the pretext that they do not produce anything, but are "food banks", while the real reason is that they do not produce the type of culture that the government likes.
One of the reasons was that cultural circles suspected something very unpleasant - that Fico and the services themselves had organized the attack against him, which does not seem so paranoid, considering the way in which Fico himself and his friends seized power and the state in general after the already "conservative" populist populists Igor Matovic and Edvard Heger. Formally, this happened through elections, which is why we talk about democratic posturing, while de facto something like a "tsar" is being installed. In other words: nothing so unfamiliar to us - with the difference that I already deeply believe in the common sense of the Bulgarian political class, i.e. in that part of it in which the Bulgarian rulers - mostly NMSV, BSP and GERB - have perfectly understood that the right to force, at least in appearance and at least officially, does not work here.
Why is there no ground for true authoritarianism in Bulgaria
And now comes the anthropological part: Why? In my opinion, because Borisov set the best example. His impressive instinct has been talked about a hundred times, but to it should be added how he seems to feel with his skin the natural immune system in the Bulgarian mental software against authoritarianism, and at no point has he really pressed the pedal. This immune system, let's say, is briefly expressed in the following: The average Bulgarian (if there is such a biological species and phenotype at all) is extremely suspicious of any attempt by a single authoritarian leader to harness him for his own purposes. This is part of the inimitable innate and even national survival instinct, combined with healthy skepticism and even rational nativism.
This mental-software mix is hardly unique, but in my opinion it works flawlessly every time someone tries to climb on the head of the otherwise unseen in the human fauna type of "average Bulgarian". This particular species can live for decades in metamorality (quite different and pragmatic compared to the English "quiet despair"), it can also know poverty, but - stepped on hard on the tail by the Cuban of possible authoritarianism - it would turn around like a black mamba in a flash and would bite the candidate fatally.
Of course, there are external reasons - no one except Putin has any idea about a brand new Orban on the EU's external border. As well as internal ones - even a cursory sociocultural analysis of the Bulgarian mass ratio indicates that, thanks to the digital revolution, it treats autocracy with the necessary suspicion.
Survival, not conquest
The Bulgarian is both a victim and a giant of predicate thinking, part of which is to adapt to the unchangeable fate - unlike the people with lateral thinking, whom we can count in the center of Sofia. There was also Turkish, Ferdinand, Borisov, and Soviet, if the DNA of larger nations contains remnants of imperial thinking, then our mental "computer" calculates mainly survival. And on several levels - from survival from power (which in our country is always vertical, ergo suspicious), through economic survival, to survival of the "hold on, lest they chase you" type.
And this eternal "they" of ours - they throw bananas, they argue up there at their own level, they increase pensions or not - is as if central to the Bulgarian contemporary psyche. But "they" are never "us", even though we partly vote, and this deserves a separate sociocultural treatise.
"He'll tell me"
Of all things, I like the mindset that protects us from the creeping authoritarianism of today - the "oh, well, he'll tell me" type. It is also somewhat related to the contempt for the rules when they don't take us out. Because otherwise we learn to seek our rights when we are only personally affected. This fateful dualism in my opinion - the rules apply, but for others - really seems to me part of a kind of native immune system.
In this sense, I seriously doubt that a bull in a glass shop like Fico is even possible in our country. Recently, many have been sewing President Radev into a similar future role, but he also seems intelligent enough to me to leave the basic freedoms and not construct a possible "state of services" in the Slovak style.
And finally, to cheer you up, but not too much: As a super-intelligent acquaintance said, Kostov saved us from becoming Belarus. I agree. Thank you, Ivan: Belarus, fortunately, we won't become, but be very careful with that thing about the frog. Because, as David Hume said, but in a different context, freedoms are won with great difficulty, but are lost in no time, and restoring them is sometimes an impossible task.
Similar to putting toothpaste back in the tube.
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This comment expresses the personal opinion of the author and may not coincide with the positions of the Bulgarian editorial office and the DW as a whole.