The Post-Communist Rise of National Populism: Bulgarian Paradoxes

Abstract

Paradoxically, Bulgarian national populism is a democratic phenomenon. During the first decade of the democratic transition, Bulgaria enjoyed a ‘shy’ nationalism; with the consolidation of democracy, radical national populism emerged. The latter is analysed in this chapter from several perspectives. The first part puts the spotlight on Ataka in a case study of this first and most emblematic national populist party in Bulgaria. It is ‘left wing, right wing, everything’ (Ghodsee). If Ataka occupies such an eclectic position along the classical socio-economic and political cleavages, it is because the party seeks to place itself along a new type of cleavage—it is transitioning from party politics to symbolic politics, from ideological to identity politics, from socio-economic and political to cultural cleavages. The second—party—perspective verifies in the case of Bulgaria the hypothesis of Eastern Europe as backsliding and the ‘usual suspect’ for every extremist nationalism. The genesis and rise of national populism is studied in regard to the diversification of its actors and their comparison in terms of agency, politics and power. The third perspective reconstructs the symbolic cartography and maps the three poles of identitarianism (politics of fear and overproduction of othering), post-secularism (religionisation of politics, exemplified in ‘Orthodox solidarity’, and statism (politics of sovereignty versus nationalism). Far-right populism is—and often wants to be—a paradoxical phenomenon. The conclusion summarises the democratic paradoxes of Bulgarian national populism.