The Bulgarian Socialist Party, which has fought most of its campaign for the country’s July 5 2009 national parliamentary elections on a platform claiming a good performance in facing the economic crisis and promising stability, is emitting increasingly negative messages.
 
Sergei Stanishev’s BSP, currently the dominant partner in the ruling coalition but which, polls say, will place second to Boiko Borissov’s Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, has stepped up attempts to drag down Borissov’s party by attempting to damn him by association with Ivan Kostov.
 
Kostov led a government as prime minister until 2001 in the years after the 1996/97 financial crisis, an era that saw a number of reforms, some of them unpopular including the way that some major privatisations were handled.
 
Some weeks ago, posters went up implying that a vote for Borissov’s party, known by its Bulgarian abbreviation as GERB, was a vote for Kostov. More recently, Kostov – a key co-founder of the centre-right Blue Coalition – has sent signals that he would be prepared to participate in a governing coalition with Borissov’s GERB.
 
Stanishev pounced, telling mass-circulation daily Trud on June 29 that Kostov would sell everything still state-owned, reviving the policies Kostov had pursued when he was prime minister. Hammering the message, in the way that a television advert showed hatchets destroying state assets, Stanishev said that neither Kostov nor Borissov had said that this would not be the case.
 
Stanishev repeated the message in a July 2 interview with bTV, saying that Borissov would be dependent on Kostov to form a coalition and emphasising that a vote for GERB would see Kostov return to government.
 
The BSP message appears to be predicated on the history of the June 2001 elections, which saw Kostov’s Union of Democratic Forces government swept from power by a huge vote for Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress.
 
A key element of the current phase of the BSP campaign has been the word "stability" which comes up time and again.
 
BSP Sofia leader Roumen Ovcharov told Trud in an interview published on July 2 that "there can be no stable government without the BSP" while in an interview with Bulgarian news agency BTA published on the same day, Stanishev said that Bulgaria needed "intelligent, capable and stable" governance that shied away from populism and unjustified risks.
 
Populism was, however, also on the mind of Borissov, who dismissed the Stanishev Cabinet decision to cut state salary spending as populist, according to a report by Bulgarian news agency Focus.
 
Borissov poured scorn on Stanishev’s attempts to link him to Kostov, saying that there was no such coalition, Focus said.
 
Then there is Ahmed Dogan, leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms – the party supported mainly by Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent – who has been the subject of bitter rhetoric from practically all quarters, especially after a recent video clip showed Dogan boasting of his power and influence notwithstanding the formal structures of governance.
 
Dogan’s party is currently in the governing coalition with the BSP, and Ovcharov was reported by Trud to have conceded that anti-Dogan sentiment could damage the BSP by association.
 
Borissov told daily Novinar in an interview on July 2 that "Dogan says he controls the financing, lest anybody missed the message".
 
It seemed few did. Yane Yanev, leader of the right-wing Order Law and Justice party, on July 1 became the latest in a series of politicians to outline in detail what "Doganisation" of Bulgaria’s politics meant, which in Yanev’s view mean a shelter for organised crime.
 
Interviewed by daily Dnevnik, Kostov and Blue Coalition co-leader Martin Dimitrov also referred to Dogan, saying that ideas doing the rounds about an "expert cabinet" would be a means for Dogan to remain part of the country’s governance.
 
Stanishev also had his sideswipe at his coalition partner, being quoted by mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa as saying that a coalition between just the BSP and MRF would serve no purpose because it would not have wide support.
 
While such revelations have seemingly had no effect in past elections, the disclosure that Dogan’s party had the largest number of candidates who had been involved with communist-era secret services gave Dogan’s detractors another stick with which to beat him.
 
"I weight 70kg and I’m this country’s bogeyman?" Dogan said in a June 29 interview with 24 Chassa, saying that his party did not "want to be loved, but to be reckoned with".
 
Two days later, speaking to Trud, Dogan hit out at all other political parties, saying that none had any idea how to lead Bulgaria out of the financial crisis. The country’s political elite was not up to the challenges Bulgaria faced, Dogan said.
 
Whether or not it would be in government, his party would be a factor in Bulgaria’s political life, Dogan said.