Salem of the Balkans: Witch Hunt in Sofia??

Much of the last couple of weeks have been filled with constant indirect arguments between Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria's current Prime Minister of the GERB party, and his predecessor, Socialist Party leader Sergey Stanishev.

The heated rhetoric is largely about the situation that Borisov has inherited from Stanishev but also about the removal of key high-ranking state administration officials that the new government has undertaken.

The question about the legacy seems to be for everyone to decide for themselves as the two leaders aren't going to settle it (despite conciliatory meetings like the one of the present and past Ministers of Finance some two weeks ago) but it does lead to a more interesting topic that has been the main line of criticism of the members of the old government on the new government of GERB - the administrative replacements.

Stanishev and his aides have been very vocal on that topic. They feel very strongly about it and explicitly accuse Borisov of politically motivated purges and "witch hunting" activities, and even threatened to report them to Brussels (as if the EU institutions police the internal political life of the member states?!).

After Borisov said that when Stanishev talked of "witch hunting", he practically called his own Ministers "witches", Stanishev even accused Borisov of being so ignorant as to not know what the term stood for, and offered to explain it to him in his capacity of a historian.

This, and the threat of "reporting to Brussels" made the whole thing a farce, a rather ridiculous story, and perhaps more so on Stanishev's side...

The fact of the matter is that the administrative personnel changes made so far by the GERB government don't really seem to be a witch hunting scare with mccarthyist features, and calling them "purges" means blowing the whole thing way out of proportion.

For one thing, there are numerous examples of top officials close to the three-way coalition government of Sergey Stanishev retaining their posts. Those include National Revenue Agency Director Krasimir Stefanov, head of the Bulgarian Energy Holding Galina Tosheva, Bulgarian National Bank Governor Ivan Iskrov, to name but a few.

For another, the new government did inherit a state with a rising budget deficit plagued with corruption and abuses of power that is still to be deprived of billions of euros of EU money by the institutions in Brussels who do not trust the Bulgarian authorities; all that in a time of raging global economic crisis.

The Stanishev government inflated the state administration as much as possible in order to find nice and influential jobs for an endless number of activists of the three governing parties, most notoriously by appointing a huge number of Deputy Ministers and Deputy District Governors.

Last but not least, the Stanishev government does seem to have spent much of the budget surplus Bulgaria still had at the end of 2008 on inefficient welfare and state employment programs aimed to achieve a propaganda effect before 2009 EU and Parliamentary Elections (not to mention any alleged abuses of state funds)... Its pork barrel policies clearly surged after January 2009.

Having said that, most of the Bulgarians, who have experienced the situation as it has been, would probably love to see a lot more top-ranking officials removed from office, and a fair number of them brought to justice, including some ministers. In fact, so many are literally dreaming of seeing at least one former minister in jail that the GERB government should be pretty careful in order not to succumb to such populist emotions.

Sofia is not going to become a Salem of the Balkans with blatant witch trials as Stanishev has repeatedly suggested. The Salem witch trials, perhaps the most famous of their type historically, have come to symbolize extremism, false accusations, ignoring due process.

Given the many violations allowed by the former government - in the words of the European Commission, among others - the greater danger is that once again a lot of people will get away with what they have committed.

The main thing the new government be concerned about is potentially failing to carry out enough inspections, investigations, and audits of all those people and institutions that are supposed to be inspected, investigated, and audited.

Because if the Stanishev government awarded annual salaries of BGN 140 000 to some of its state employees (from the Information Services Agency), as has been revealed, (and Bulgaria is no country with super-demanding supersecret programs that they could potentially have been in charge of), then there must have been a whole lot rotten in the state of Bulgaria over the past government term.

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