Most people who on one or another occasion have been forced to seek the assistance of Bulgarian embassies abroad are not always full of good memories.
 
Fortunately, I have never been in a situation when I had to seek the assistance of my embassy. Hence I cannot comment on that from personal experience but I can say a lot about the way embassies function when it comes to opening polling stations.
 
Bulgaria will vote for Parliament on July 5 2009 and, according to the law, the Foreign Ministry through its diplomatic representatives abroad should organise polling stations so that Bulgarians based abroad can vote. Pretty much this is what all embassies worldwide do as part of their duties.
 
This is where the problem starts. Until recently there weren’t that many Bulgarians living abroad, hence political parties neglected them as they did not have much to offer in terms of votes.
 
Today, however, this has changed and we have good number of Bulgarians living throughout the European Union, most notably in the UK, Spain, Germany and Belgium.
 
Most of these people work legally, are well educated and have a desire to take part in elections, according to reports in Bulgarian media. Unfortunately, it seems that they are still treated with the same disregard because their number is relatively small compared to voters in Bulgaria.  
 
This is clear in the way embassy people organise the voting process. Something which should be routine is turned into a never-ending saga. At the last elections for European Parliament there were a number of reports from people living in Germany, for example, or Brussels, about poor organisation at polling stations.  
 
It is as if no one in Bulgaria cares about Bulgarian expatriates’ votes. All embassy staff seem to care about is that they have to work on a Sunday. Forums were full of comments from people who had to travel several kilometres to vote, only to confront chaos at polling stations.
 
OK, maybe some of these reports were exaggerated and not all embassies were like that. But the fact that there were reports coming from almost every EU country where Bulgarians voted suggests that not everything was done to order.  
 
I don’t think embassy people understand what it means to live abroad and vote in your country’s elections. It is an act of emotion. It's a nice feeling that your country still counts you as having something to say about how things are going on back home. And when you are greeted by grim faces and long queues, the disappointment is guaranteed.
 
There is of course the great example of Turkey, which is not an EU member, where efforts are not spared when it comes to the thousands of Bulgarians living there.
 
A day ago, it was announced that a record high number of polling stations will be opened for elections there because, at the previous election in 2005, turnout was so high that there weren’t enough polling stations and ballots.
 
So it seems that the votes of Bulgarians living in Turkey, which is not an EU member state, are somewhat more important than the votes of people living in other EU countries.
 
And look at the list of cities where Bulgarian can vote abroad, published by the Foreign Ministry on June 19. For countries where there is only one polling station there is no problem because the polling station is in the premises of the embassy.
 
In countries where they are several polling stations, however, the list only says and I quote:
 
The UK:
London 1
London 2
London 3
London 4
 
The document doesn’t reveal the addresses of these polling stations.
 
So if I was living in London I would have spent several minutes (I hope not hours) calling the embassy and asking them which is the nearest polling station to my place.
 
It shouldn’t be like that. I mean - how difficult is it to put the addresses of all polling stations in one document? And London is not the only case. There are 16 polling stations in Spain, for example, each in a different city, but the document doesn’t reveal their addresses either.
 
Maybe the Foreign Ministry needs time to compile all the addresses. If this is the case I hope they do it faster but right now the picture doesn’t look very bright.
 
And what’s with this rule about having at least 100 registered voters to open a polling station?
 
A colleague of mine just recently voted at his country’s national elections and he was one of the few nationals (less than 10) living in the country. And this is a country that has more than 20 million registered voters while Bulgaria’s entire population is less than eight million people.