In the international chaos that surrounds the US presidential election, it’s easy to forget that other countries also exist, and face their own political cataclysms.
One of them happened on Sunday, November 6 at the first round of the Bulgarian presidential elections. Out of 23 candidates, the first round of the elections pushed forward Tsetska Tsatcheva, speaker of the National Assembly, and member of the decision making circles of Bulgaria’s current ruling party, GERB. The other candidate, which came forward with the most votes is Rumen Radev, backed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). Radev won 25.45% of the popular vote. Tsatcheva got 21.97%. 6.2% of the Bulgarian citizens who showed up to their polling stations to vote ticked off “I do not support any of the candidates”.
(Election results in Bulgaria after round 1)
Only 52% of Bulgarians actually voted in the election.
What does this low turnout say about the Bulgarian voter? That they are tired of the system? That they are disheartened? That at their core, they’ve been overcome by apathy with regard to our country’s policies and law makers in the twenty odd years since the transition from communism?
(Tsetska Tsacheva)
As a Bulgarian citizen living abroad, voting was a difficult experience – with no polling station near me, I had to travel over an hour by train, and then queue for another two hours, waiting for an opportunity to cast my vote for the person who would represent me and my country internationally for the next five years. Standing in line, surrounded by other Bulgarians was a disheartening experience, to say the least.
The voters in queue were pre-dominantly men, a little younger than my father, perhaps, or his age, who wore what has now become a uniform of sorts for the Slav considered as a monolith – tracksuits and over pried trainers, windbreakers, and golden chains around their thick necks. The women in line were mostly there with their husbands or boyfriends. Despite the polling station being set on the campus of Manchester University, few young people were in line. Only four or five that I saw in the two and half hours I spent there.
Most of my peers did not show up to vote, and some stated explicitly that they will not.
“I am not going to vote. Who will I vote for? None of the candidates interest me.” said a friend over messenger. She identifies herself as a communist at heart. She does not believe in our system. Yet she bristles when anyone maligns our country. Why then, the adamant refusal to be a part of deciding its future?
“I’d like to vote. But it’s too much of a hassle. What’s the point in just wasting the whole day queuing?” said another.
Meanwhile, my social media was flooded with posts and statuses to “vote, vote, vote”, ambiguously, because I am friends with many Americans and Bulgarians, it was a game of “Which election are you talking about?”
(Rumen Radev)
But standing in line on that Saturday i was beginning to wonder what I’m doing there at all. As always, when surrounded by men who are taller and louder than me, I began to doubt my own political convictions, feeling at once inadequate, unprepared, misinformed, even though I’d been following political campaigns closely, and reflecting on each candidate.
“I refuse to vote for a woman. You simply do not vote for women. You vote for men.” said a man loudly, to one of his friends, clapping him on the shoulder. Just five minutes before, he’d handed me a declaration form with a smile, “We should fill them out now, so we don’t have to wait inside.” he’d said. He was there with his wife. And he would smile at me, and put his hands on her shoulders, and he would not vote for a woman!
I wish this was the only thing I heard that day. I wish there weren’t so many other similar comments around me, that made me feel eager to crawl out of my skin, out of this queue, forget the election and go home.
“I refuse to vote for a president. It doesn’t matter, does it, they’re all the same?” asked another man. He clutched a voter declaration all the same, but he was angry and bitter, and he spoke in the same vein for a while. “And what is it to us anyway,” he concluded, “We’re here, and they’re there.”
“What’s the point of the referendum anyway? I’m not voting in that.” – “Just tick YES on everything and go.” was another conversation I overheard. Someone needed the referendum questions explained to them. More people had more questions about it.
The presidential election was combined with a national referendum concerning three very important topics:
1. Do you support electing MPs through majority vote in two rounds?
2. Do you support introducing mandatory vote in elections and national referendums?
3. Do you support making the national subsidy afforded to political parties and coalitions 1 BGN per 1 real vote received at the latest parliamentary elections?
All questions presented a YES and NO box to be ticked off by the voter. The voter turnout for the referendum was 49%. Some experts argued that these questions are too complex to be given a simple YES/NO answer and that they are inappropriate questions for a referendum.
That having been said, all three questions were overwhelmingly answered with YES, by 60% of the voters, and will be put forward for discussion by the government and law makers.
In the queue, everyone agreed they wanted less money for the parties. They didn’t want voting to be mandatory. Mostly. A group of older gentlemen definitely had something to say about communism.
No one had anything good to say about the voting itself. No one had anything good to say at all.
(Election results after round 2, unanimously Radev wins popular vote in every region of the country)
On November 13, Tsatcheva and Radev faced off in the second round of the election.
Rumen Radev won with 58% of the votes. The current Prime Minister, Boyko Borisov has announced the resignation of his government in the coming weeks. Early parliamentary elections are expected in spring.
The Bulgarian voter is proven right once again, looking at another political crisis. This will be the fourth change of government in Bulgaria since 2013. The term for Prime Minister is four years.
(Bulgarian PM Boyko Borisov announces his resignation after the election results)
In the wake of yet another change in the ruling class, the embittered Bulgarian voter might find even more reason to lose faith in his country, and in the value of his vote. The voter turnout for the second election round only serves to prove that, dropping to 47%. Even so, that doesn’t seem to have impacted those, who came into the voting booth to make their voice heard with a protest vote. 6.6% of the voters at second round have ticked the “I do not support either candidate” box.
Will this change of government bring actual change to Bulgaria’s political system? Only time will tell.