“We need more links between Bulgarian and Romanian journalists and media in general”

Iulia Bahovski, byjulia.ro, November 27, 2024

In the context generated by the results of the first round of the presidential elections and the approaching parliamentary elections, more and more voices in the Romanian public space refer to the political crisis in Bulgaria that could arise in Romania, as a result of the formation of a fragmented parliament with a significant composition of extremist parties.

Based on these statements, and knowing some aspects of the political scene south of the Danube, I thought it would be useful to find out more information from the source and to open a dialog about what exactly this crisis means, how it is manifesting itself and whether it really constitutes a warning for Romania.

I also believe that after ’89, the course of the two countries, being identical but with sometimes different challenges, each of them has an experience to share and lessons to learn from each other.

So we set off on a series of conversations with people from Bulgaria itself, to take the pulse of the grassroots, get to know each other better and find out how we can make it better and easier for us to be together in these not easy times.

The first interlocutor is Vladimir Mitev, journalist and founder of the Romanian-Bulgarian blog The Bridge of Friendship, one of the friends of our country, and not only a good connoisseur of the Romanian language, people, places and events in Romania, but also a recognized analyst of the Romanian issues in the Bulgarian press, and of the Bulgarian one in our press.

Bulgaria is facing unprecedented political instability, with seven rounds of parliamentary elections in the last three years. How did it come to this and what is the current situation?

The political crisis is expected to continue, and in the spring of 2025 most likely we will vote in parliamentary elections for the eighth time in the last four years. This crisis has probably arisen because society has become very polarized, and the political winds blowing in our region are blowing in different directions, with the Bulgarian political elite, like other countries in the region, looking for a big brother among the big countries of the world, through cooperation with which to move forward.

During GERB’s rule until 2021, although the big brother was Germany, Boiko Borisov managed to be on good terms with many decision-makers – Trump, Orban, Putin, Erdogan. After Borisov fell from power, Bulgaria entered the French zone of influence in the EU.

However, the fragmentation and polarization in Bulgarian politics intensified with the start of the wars in Ukraine, then the one in the Middle East. At present, the traditional Bulgarian model of “being nice to everyone” seems difficult or impossible to implement at the top of the state, which is one of the reasons why a stable government has not been formed.

There are other reasons. The Bulgarian political model itself is in crisis. Most political parties do not have a party life and do not create bridges between citizens and political power. They are only a link between business interests of various kinds and the authorities, and citizens are only expected to legitimize, by voting, the party lists put forward by influential groups in society.

In my opinion, one of the possible changes, slow, difficult and thankless, is related to efforts to create and increase social capital in Bulgarian society. Today Bulgaria is a society of ‘tribes’. People form in-groups, live through them, each in his own bubble, all people are in competition, domination and hegemony through the groups that give them power. More people need to emerge in society who are able to exist economically, emotionally and existentially without a group and in association with fellow citizens of different origins, ages and beliefs. If these people of networks, rather than tribes, were to settle in Bulgarian society, they could inject energy into the social system and thus transform it.

I believe that international contacts are very important for the success of this change. Contemporary Bulgarians are often suspicious of those who are different and unaffiliated to one tendency or another in Bulgarian society. But those who have something extra, and share with others and behave with goodwill, are considered positive heroes.

Some say that the crisis in the Bulgarian political system will end when President Rumen Radev will form his own party to sweep away the failed parties and political projects of the moment. In my opinion, the crisis in Bulgarian society is deeper and finding a savior or a messiah will not solve it. Bulgarians now rely too often on accumulating power in relationships rather than on dialog, mutual respect, sensitivity and empathy. In my view, change in Bulgaria means de-hegemonization. If this process goes ahead, our politicians will discover in themselves an unexpected capacity for consensus and cooperation, and in its foreign policy Bulgaria will be able to play its traditional role as a bridge much better. And it will not be a static bridge between unchanging shores, but a dynamic bridge in a dynamic environment, evolving with it. The difficulty of building such dynamic bridges inside and outside the country is also part of the Bulgarian political crisis.

In Romania, which seemed to be a much more stable country, the recent presidential elections caused upheavals on the domestic and international scene. Parliamentary elections are coming up in Romania. Could Bulgaria be a warning of what could happen in Romania if a stable majority coalition is not formed?

It is a mystery to me which of the two countries is ahead of the other in political development. While Borisov was still in power and there were protests against him, I wrote several articles (here, here and here) using Romanian concepts and social phenomena to explain Bulgarian politics. It seemed to me then that Romania could provide keys to understanding Bulgaria, where there is generally a fog in political and social terms, not least because few analysts develop good concepts that can be used to interpret exactly what is happening in Bulgaria.

Specifically, in 2020, I thought Romania had traveled the road ahead of Bulgaria and was ahead in its development.

At the moment, however, it seems to me that it is exactly the opposite. The 2020 protests in Bulgaria united nationalists and liberals, with some leftist forces, to dismantle the Borisov stabilocracy. In Romania today, the Ciucă-Ciolacu stabilocracy is again under attack from two main groups – the sovereignists and the NGO sector. The former are represented in the second round of the presidential elections by Călin Georgescu, the latter – by Elena Lasconi.

The situation may not be exactly identical, but I am concerned that the Bulgarian political crisis, which combines polarization and fragmentation, may not spread to Romania. After all, Romanian society has grassroots movements in many areas and reaches critical mass in activism or social issues more easily. I expect that these two characteristics will help Romanians not to reach the crisis that Bulgarians are going through and which I already mentioned in my answer to the first question.

Bulgaria has a history closer to Russia, including in cultural and economic terms. To what extent is the Russian influence still felt in Bulgarian politics and society compared to Romania?

Until the war in Ukraine, Russian interests in Bulgarian energy were extremely strong. After it started, the gas interconnector with Greece was launched and the liquefied gas terminal was built at Alexandroupolis, in which the Bulgarian state has a 20% stake. Natural gas now flows through Greece to Romania, Republic of Moldova and other countries in the region.

Bulgaria has also started a project to build two new units of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant with US company Westinghouse. Fuel for the existing Kozloduy nuclear units has also been diversified. In addition to Russian fuel, American and French fuel can be used. As for Lukoil Neftochim in Burgas, the largest refinery in the Balkans, it is being discussed for sale under pressure from the Bulgarian state.

These are just some of the examples that show that even if there was a special role of Russian economic interests during the transition in Bulgaria, it has evolved towards diversification in recent years.

In my opinion, Romanians have not yet fully realized that today’s Bulgaria, 35 years after the beginning of the democratic changes, is not the country that was said in the 1970s to be the most loyal satellite of the Soviet Union. Already between Zhivkov and Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s there was friction and a reorientation of the Bulgarian economy towards Germany and Japan. Today Bulgaria is a member of NATO and the EU, which in my opinion is of significant geopolitical importance. In 2023, 63% of Bulgaria’s exports and 60% of its imports were to and from EU countries. Bulgaria is close to joining the eurozone. Bulgaria has also attracted its share of Western European investment in big cities in industry, including auto industry, in the banking sector, in the extractive sector (mining) – just like Romania.

I think that the time has come for Romanians to stop seeing the Bulgarian experience as a “traumatizing zone” and, more precisely, to stop seeing Bulgarians through the prism of Russian trauma. Even in Romanian society, in the first round of the presidential elections on November 24, 2024, 3.5 million people voted for sovereignist candidates, and one of them won the first round with an openly pro-Russian rhetoric.

Maybe it is time for Romanian society and the elite to realize that there are Russophiles in many Western countries and even in Romania itself. Russian interests in countries such as Germany, France, Austria, Austria, Hungary, Great Britain, Turkey, etc. are much greater than in Bulgaria. There is also speculation that Donald Trump is a “man of the Russians”. But this does not prevent Romania from having many Trumpsters. Nor has it prevented the excellent economic ties between Romania and all the listed European countries with traditional ties to Russia.

It is not clear in what way Bulgarian Russophilia is so different from many other Russophilias that are not countered in Romanian society. For example, unlike Bulgaria, Serbia is not a member of NATO or the EU and is seen by many as a conduit for Russian interests in the region. But among many Romanians there is interest in Serbs and Belgrade, and Serbian Russophilia does not seem to be a problem. While about the Bulgarians, who are part of NATO and the EU, there continues to be the view that we are almost all Russian agents here.

In my opinion, Romania’s acute sensitivity to Bulgarian Russophilia hampers Romania’s ambitions for a more active presence in the region. It is time for the Romanian elites to discover that in Bulgaria, as in Romania, there is Germanophilia, Americanophilia, we belong together to the French-speaking community, etc. This projection of negative qualities in ourselves onto our neighbors prevents synchronization in our region, prevents the growth of potential in Romania’s relations with the region and is not good European practice.

It does not speak well for any of the nations if Bulgarians and Romanians are not able to build trust between themselves and always need Western partners to ensure that partners across the Danube are trustworthy and there will be no surprises in the relations. If we have the ambition to carry weight in the region, we need to develop our ability to influence our neighbors. And if Romanians really have a problem with someone’s Russophilia, and this acts as a trauma for them, I believe that those Romanians will develop their capabilities in international relations if they learn to influence that trauma. Relations with the Bulgarians can be very useful in this respect, because Bulgaria is a NATO and EU ally, so there is no way anything bad can come from them.

I wrote more about the fact that the Romanian press is so far failing to discover in Bulgaria anything other than “eternal Russia” here.

How does Russia’s hybrid warfare manifest itself in Bulgaria? What is the public narrative?

In media terms, Bulgaria is not so much a Russophile country, but rather a Hungarianphile country. We have many sovereignist podcasts. They usually attack American democrats, the European Commission, Soros and politicians associated with them. In other words, they reproduce Orbanist logic. Or they criticize Bulgarian governments’ intentions to join the eurozone.

In my opinion, we need to have a keen sensitivity and judge carefully whether an influencer or podcast is Russophile or is rather a media whose authors are socialized in a purely Bulgarian context, with a sense of periphery and autochthonousness or ideological conservatism towards the supposedly internationalist elites with ties to the EU core.

I am afraid that some Romanians and Bulgarians do not perceive these nuances and categorize as Russophile everything that is not clearly defined as “central” or anti-Russian. In this way, these Romanians or Bulgarians hinder their own evolution towards greater complexity, because there is a great diversity and pluralism of ways of being European, and knowing them can strengthen our Europeanness, not reduce it.

One thing that I personally find interesting in Bulgarian society is the presence of ambiguity. Many Bulgarians avoid taking extreme positions on acute political issues and seek instead some intermediate, neutral, indeterminate or nuanced positions. Refusing to be against someone does not necessarily mean you are for them. It may mean that, potentially, the person in question is looking for a more complex position, even if they can’t define it at the moment. Romanians could increase their potential if they learned to decipher and deal with Bulgarian ambiguity.

Are there differences in the way Romania and Bulgaria approach and combat disinformation? What lessons could they learn from each other in this respect?

In Bulgaria, an important media institution combating fake news is Factcheck.bg, a project of the Association of European Journalists – Bulgaria. Bulgarian National Radio also has a unit to fight disinformation.

In Romania, there are news bulletins exposing fake news and disinformation. I follow the activities of the Veridica website, which exposes fake news in Romania, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine.

I think the Coalition for Media Literacy has an interesting Bulgarian experience. Many young people from Generation Z participate in this coalition and in the Factcheck.bg website. That is to say, some of the most promising young journalists are establishing themselves in journalism as fighters against disinformation.

What distinguishes the Romanian experience in general is the presence of a critical mass. The Misreport newsletter has 7,800 followers on Facebook and its Substack posts generate over 40 likes each. Interestingly, Veridica does not only combat misinformation in the Romanian media. It also publishes in-depth analysis in the field of international relations.

I would like to see joint Romanian-Bulgarian counteractions to fake news, which indeed exist in the Romanian-Bulgarian space. I have identified such news and I can say that not all fake news seems to be Russian. Sometimes even fake news is the result of human error – for example, mistranslation.

Anything else to say in the end?

We need more links between Bulgarian and Romanian journalists and the media in general. The problem of trust in Romanian-Bulgarian relations among citizens persists. I hope that this interview will contribute to some evolution in the understanding of bilateral relations and the role of external factors in them by both our peoples.

Photo: The eyes through which we look at the world are the eyes through which the world looks at us (source: Pixabay, CC0)

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