A system devouring itself: Bulgaria’s protest on the eve of euro adoption

Op-ed on the beginning of the new political crisis in Bulgaria only a year since the last elections, the issue is deeper than policies.

Monday evening, 1st of December, hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians gathered in possibly the biggest protest since the 90s, when the state went bankrupt and inflation reached 2000%.

While many English-speaking media frame it as merely unrest against the proposed 2026 budget, this misses the bigger picture. At the same time, Bulgarian legacy media refuses to cover reality, instead invoking riot-like imagery. Unless they decide to not talk about it at all while it's happening, being much more interested in two police horses retiring. Yes, this is actually what the Bulgarian National Television was broadcasting while the entire central Sofia was occupied by protesters. In reality, people came out because they are tired, tired of being constantly deceived and leached off by parasites. A condition that knows neither political affiliation, nor age with people ranging from teenagers to pensioners attending.

Misrepresenting events and overall silencing of voices are not the only tactics that the oligarchy has inherited from the Zhivkov regime, Bulgaria’s “communist” dictatorship. There were, of course, instigators who sought to turn the explicitly peaceful protest into violent riots, most likely with the end goal of endangering innocent people’s lives and justifying police brutality and oppression. Brutality with which the ministry of the interior has made itself infamous for, a recent example being the 2020 anti-corruption protests, when downed protesters were mercilessly beaten and at least one sexually assaulted.

Protesters knew days in advance that paid hooligan groups would be mobilized for the task of instigating, and so hundreds were prepared to film and document when the vandalism began. The police was also clearly informed that provocations would take place, as nearly a hundred militarized officers stood by, non-reactive, while less than 30 hooligans in hoodies and masks were attempting to set alight an office of the ruling coalition. Ultimately, it was the peaceful protesters who prevented the arson. This is happening while conveniently an entire neighbourhood in the center lost electrical power and telecommunications with people in Independence Square had become unavailable.

If not the budget, then what was the cause for so many people to come out?

It is true that the first protest on the 27th of November was triggered by the absurd budget for 2026 that passed on first reading. It planned to raise social security contributions and double dividend taxes, along with the 8th year in a row of deficit spending, in return citizens would get… pretty much nothing benefitting people except another wage increase for the police, after they already raised them by 50% and bought them brand new BMW’s this year, funny there were no BMW’s on Monday, only old Opels.

Oh and how could I forget: MORE overpriced government projects that will never be completed by ‘friendly’ business partners…

But the issue is much bigger than the budget: outside of major cities, quality of life is dropping; we have the fastest shrinking population in the world due to emigration; not to mention the suffocating corruption and some of the worst media freedom in the EU. At the heart of a lot of these issues is a criminal organization calling itself the Bulgarian government, whose de facto leaders are Boyko Borisov and Delyan Peevski. Two crooks who usurped the power of the old regime by killing competitors and swallowing old state assets, the latter is also currently sanctioned by the British and American governments for corruption. These two, forced into cooperation due to mutual compromising dependencies, have been attempting to crack down on dissidents, most overtly recently attempting to imprison Varna’s mayor and attempting to institute a law that would put journalists in jail for “disseminating information about a person’s personal life without their consent”. But this only scratches the surface, and thorough analysis of our “political system” is not the purpose of this text.

The purpose is to inform people that the euro zone’s newest member has a system rotten to the core, a system devouring people’s freedoms and ability to develop while also sucking dry whatever little people have left in their pockets. While Bulgarian cynicism towards the possibility of change is justified, there is a reason for hope, because as a close friend who was there put it “this an all-national civil unrest against the system headed by those two” and

"it is important because [the protest] was not bought, because everything in Bulgaria has become bought, our democracy is bought, our media is bought, everything is bought” (Pavel Nikolov, Dec. 2nd)

Europe needs to pay attention to its rotten apples as a few are enough to ruin the bunch and the inertia of euro adoption (never mind that half the population does not want it), is not enough to protect human rights. While we espouse them on the international stage, trampling them by financing genocide, we also turn a blind eye to our more direct actions at home. It is at best hypocritical and at worst human-hating. We should be worried about what is happening inside and outside the union as the ghoulish cause behind both is the same.

I want to wake up one day and know that I come from a free nation.