Month: March 2013

There is a Robinson Crusoe-like syndrome among Albanians, which can be dissected in two psychological moments. The first, a feeling of isolation which comes not only as a political isolation of the present and past, but also as a mentality which rarely steps over the home-border of social and political commitment. Such a phenomenon produces the second psychological moment, which is a misinterpretation that goes beyond Balkan politics.

Such shallowness of expertise is very visible when discussing Greece.

Since mid-February, a popular uprising has brought out thousands in city squares across Bulgaria, giving voice to grievances accumulated over the last 23 years and reinserting the popular into the country’s politics. What began as a spontaneous expression of discontent at the rising electricity prices grew into a protest against the role of the privatized electricity monopolies that charge those prices, and then into a mass demonstration against the whole post-socialist model and the political class that has perpetuated it.

The events in Bulgaria are moving so fast that it seems that whatever commentators will say will be rendered immediately as non-contemporaneous to them: either too soon or too late. Such instability is driven by the behaviour of the main actors themselves: one day the prime minister is certain he won’t resign (so as not to let the socialists and the Turks take power, he explained), the next day he deposits the resignation of the entire cabinet in Parliament, the official reason being that he cannot stand to watch an enclosed parliament while his “brothers” – the police – beat up citizens trying to reach the building.

In the first days of 2013 a photograph got to the attention of Bulgarian anti-racists and elicited a few quick replies. The photograph was uploaded in the spring of 2012 by a 28-year-old ethnic Bulgarian female, Margarita Angelova from Radnevo. The text that accompanies the photograph expresses outrage at the high income of single mothers of Romani descent inBulgaria. According to Margarita’s description, the photograph shows “An 11-15 years’ old Gypsy woman, who, instead of studying, has given birth to her first child, is automatically allotted the following childcare benefits.”

The release of Vladimir Tismaneanu’s book Lumea secreta a nomenclaturii [The Secret World of the Nomenklatura] constitutes an event. Not so much because of its content though as the author remains faithful to his own style pasting and copying information and part of the texts in the book from older published works and his personal blog thus setting a new record, one hard to beat, in terms of self-plagiarism. This book, with its concise and explicitly personal nature, is extraordinarily revealing of something genuinely symptomatic of the author’s psychological structure and his academically-flavored anti-communism, the two being inextricably intertwined.

In the bestiary of east European political monsters Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov is a peculiarly elusive species. When he first came to power in 2009 both the remains of the 1990s liberal anticommunist concert (think tanks-media-the old right wing parties), and the ordinary people were thrusting contradictory hopes on Borisov’s shoulders. The liberal elite was seeing in him a handy populist tool that could be skillfully used to further the perpetually unfinished neoliberal reform package and stabilize its shaking ideological hegemony.