The compass continues to be broken.

Guest author: Kristiyan Hristov

This article is a continuation of "Left, Right Undecided: The Compass Remains Broken" from " 2020: Inside and Beyond "

Eleven days after election day and on the day of the first session of the 45th National Assembly (fortunately in the right building), the left-right divide still does not exist.

Again, the division is based on survival, on the basis of the system. There is no debate about what the state should be and its participation in the economy, there is only a struggle whether it will survive after 11 years of, to put it mildly, unprofessional representation or will continue with the main goal of "absorbing" Bulgarian and European taxpayers' funds.

The political debate, the left and right directions for the economy, will not appear in the "arena of ideas" until the subtle - and not so subtle - scheming in the highest bodies of the state is eliminated.

Let's look at how the campaign for the main contenders on both sides of the broken compass ended. Instead of moving along the left-right or liberalism-conservatism axis, Bulgaria seems to be moving along the scheme-change axis, with scheme-change being the clear winner in this not-so-ideological dispute over the past ten years.

In the last two months, the mantra that they are protecting us from the communists has fallen out. "The true right" was an election slogan of a relic from the early 90s, already bought and sold at least three times by its enemies. Together with another worn-out mantra - "Work, work, work", the GERB and UDF parties managed to lose 350 thousand votes. In their defense, we will say that it is hardly because of the election slogans.

And it's no better elsewhere. "With care for the Bulgarians", but the Bulgarians abandoned even the oldest representatives of the status quo in the country, the Bulgarian Socialist Party. Despite attempts to brand itself as part of the anti-system parties, the left also felt the people's love, or rather the lack of it, also reporting a drop of 400 thousand votes.

It's no better in foreign languages either. Despite regaining the votes taken by Mestan in 2017, "Restart of Statehood" remained nothing more than an unsuccessful rap. After a year of footage from Dogan's palace the size of Borisov Garden, "ethnic peace" and the "unique Bulgarian ethnic model" have lost their power.

"Bulgaria Above All" did not even manage to enter parliament. It took four years for VMRO, NFSB, VOLYA, and ATAKA to collapse their support to below four percent. The transfer of personnel from GERB to VMRO did not help much either. Electorally speaking, the issue of North Macedonia did not prove to be a driving force, and the duplication of the position of GERB and VMRO also proved to be a problem.

But not everyone lost votes.

Slavi Trifonov's 20-year on-air support shot him straight to the front ranks of parliament. Without declaring almost any ideological profile (except that he does not like left-wing ideas), Trifonov finished second and left the BSP behind. The campaign of "There is such a people" passed quietly, without debates and without appearances - which can be considered a good move. On the one hand, because this way the inexperience was at least partially covered up, and on the other, because everyone else was left to fumble.

After an unexpected turn of events for everyone, including the democratic community, "Democratic Bulgaria" did not get 6-7%, as sociologists had assumed, but almost 10%. The union will have only three deputies less than the MRF, which makes it an unavoidable factor in the eventual formation of the government. The result is higher than those of the "Blue Coalition" in 2009 or the "Reformist Bloc" in 2014 - and far above the total number of votes for the parties in the coalition that appeared independently in 2017.

The "Stand Up! Get Out!" formation seems to be on the verge of disintegrating as such even before it crosses the threshold of the National Assembly, but it nevertheless managed to convince 150,000 voters and bring in 14 MPs, who will have a disproportionately large relative weight in the highly fragmented parliament.

The upshot of all this is that change is finally happening. The one-party model with crutches, at least for the moment, seems to be in a state of disarray, but not a knockout. The possibility of new elections soon – either in the summer or in the fall – is highly likely to become a reality. But either way, it seems that governing the country via Facebook live streams is coming to an end, even though Borisov is still the prime minister pro forma.

When the parties, especially the new ones, finish with the bitovisms, we may also turn back to the lost mission of Bulgarian politics - a clear ideological division at the level not only of slogans, but also of ideas and actions.

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