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 mobilised 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…

Editor's note - Borisov (left) and Peevski (right)

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.