Bulgarian President Parvanov's Much ABV About Nothing

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov finally gave the formal start of his new formation, a potential political party, badly disguised as some sort of civic movement.

The Alternative for Bulgarian Revival, or ABV (an acronym standing for the first three letters of the Bulgarian alphabet) was unveiled Thursday, November 11, under the slogan "The Day After", apparently an allusion to November 10 – the day hailed as the end of Bulgaria's communist regime (actually, the day of an intra-party coup in the Bulgarian Communist Part in 1989).

The ABV movement is widely believed to be set up in order to turn into a political party, that led by the charisma, experience, skills and power of President Parvanov, should be able to challenge Prime Minister Borisov's ruling center right party GERB, another acronym standing for "Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria" but also meaning "coat of arms."

The message of the President and the founding members of the new formation, however, is different: they claim the new entity is non-partisan, and is not anti- the existing political parties but "above" the political parties, and is aimed at providing a qualitatively new approach to public affairs and politics in Bulgaria. Yet, the ABV should not necessarily be seen as a "political alternative."

Parvanov himself stated that the current government only has a "strong hand" but is badly deficient as far as "competence" is concerned.

He declared that Bulgaria does not need new parties but that it needs "personalities", successful and recognized people and experts.

Whether the President is right in his criticism of the Borisov Cabinet is another story. He might well be to a great extent – after all for the first several months of its term in office, the GERB party had serious difficulties finding enough people and having the right people for the right positions.

However, it is important not to focus on the ABV project itself for chances are it is going to play – or at least it is going to try to play - a much larger role in Bulgarian politics than its founders want to admit at present.

First of all, why are they, including Parvanov, denying so vehemently that the new formation will become a political movement or a party? Apparently, they want to present it as something new and fresh, a formation that is different from the long-established model of partisanship hated by so many in Bulgaria.

At the same time, however, the ABV formation appears to be on the way to solidifying a pattern in which a new powerful political entity starts as a "civic movement" or even a "civic platform."

The National Movement for Stability and Prosperity (NMSP) of former Tsar Simeon Saxe-Coburg was started the same way in 2001, and so was Borisov's party itself in 2005. Both became political parties a few months later, and shortly after that swept the respective elections. Now, whether ABV will have the same kind of electoral success is another story. But it does seem to be starting the same way, and to have similar – though obviously hidden – or hiddenly obvious – ambitions for the time after Parvanov has completed his second term as President in 2012 but will still be in good health and in the prime of his political career, and would probably not want to dedicate the rest of his days to university lectures, charity work, writing memoirs, or making tapestry.

Second, the President seems to be advertising his project as having a certain number of outstanding and successful individuals – that are supposed to have the trust of the Bulgarian people.

Looking at the list of names, however, one fails to be impressed. One would really imagined that the new "political project" apparently prepared for so long would somehow have attracted and put forth a more impressive list of individuals.

Let's look at who've got so far: Thursday's "The Day After" forum was organized by an action group, which includes Borislav Kitov, Vice President of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union and a former MP; Prof. Grigor Gorchev, President of the Medical University in the city of Pleven; Prof. Vasil Prodanov, Director of the Philosophical Research Institute at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences; Emil Kalo, former chairman of the Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria Shalom; Miho Mihov, former Chair of Staff at the Army, former adviser to the president on military security in the country, former ambassador to Macedonia; Krasimir Petrov, former director of the General Directorate Border Police and a former head of the Special Anti-Terrorist Task Force (SOBT) and director of the Sofia Directorate of the Interior (SDVR); the gold-winning athletes Yordan Yovchev (gymnast) and Valentin Yordanov (wrestler), and Mariana Todorova, expert in the President's Administration. Bulgaria's former Foreign Minister in the Socialist-led government of PM Stanishev Ivaylo Kalfin, Blagoevgrad's Socialist Mayor Kostadin Paskalev, and BSP MP and famous actor Stefan Danailov were also with notable presence.

With all due respect to all these men and women and to their achievements, one can't help but wonder if they are the epitome of the expert potential mustered by the President in his political project plans. While they might have been recognized professionals in their fields, their abilities to exercise good governance on a state level are doubtful at best.

What is even more important – is that those are all old and oftentimes questionable faces, nobody fresh and nobody new. What was really striking these days was a TV interview of Alexander Lilov, a former key politician in the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party, and then in the 1990s Bulgarian Socialist Party, a person known as the "Strategist" of the Socialists after 1990 who engineered the party's course towards social democracy, and a philosopher researching ideology and international relations. Lilov's verdict of the new project of Parvanov was harsh and simple: the ABV movement is pointless precisely because it brings no new faces and no new talent in Bulgarian politics.

I for one think that the President is not right in his assessment that Bulgarians and Bulgarian politics need most of all some kind of established individuals and prominent figures to lead them. To the contrary – today's Bulgaria and the Bulgarian nation really need a renewed spirit, moral values, unifying faith, a sense of direction based on more than the pleasing of consumerist wishes and mere construction of roads. No Bulgarian political movement – including the ruling GERB party – is offering anything like that...

But the actual needs of the Bulgarian aside (...), another important question has to do with whether the President is violating the Constitution with his involvement with the ABV formation.

Article 92 of the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria (adopted in 1991) states that "The President is the head of state. He personifies the unity of the nation and represents the Republic of Bulgaria in international relations."

Article 95 (2) says, "The President and the Vice President cannot be members of parliament, or perform other state, public, and economic activities, and to participate in the leadership of political parties."

Just as the ABV project was unveiled, the nationalist party Ataka called for Parvanov's impeachment because he violated the Constitution; its senior party GERB said it would start consultations for the impeachment of the President with the other political parties in the Parliament.

It is clear, however, that in the present form of the ABV movement Parvanov is not violating the Constitution. The Constitution for some reason only bans the President from being the leader of a political party – he is allowed to be a member. As of now, however, ABV is no political party, and he is not listed as part of its leadership.

The claims for impeachment themselves amount solely to empty talk as GERB and Ataka do not have the 160 MPs needed to impeach the President; if the rightist Blue Coalition joins them, they can muster 153 MPs out of 240. And even if they had 160s, the final ruling on the impeachment would belong to the Constitutional Court, which will hardly vote to remove the President.

A similar impeachment scenario in the fall of 2009 already failed. What is more, hypothetically, if Parvanov is impeached, then his not so popular deputy, Angel Marin, will become President. (A Bulgarian political joke from the last few years goes, "Q: Which is the only presidential couple that is worse than "Parvanov-Marin? A: "Marin-Parvanov") This will then untie the hands of Parvanov to really become the leader of a political party before January 2012 when his term expires.

The final question mark about ABV has to do with its potential relations with "parent" or "mother" formation, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, that Parvanov chaired in 1997-2001. The founding of the ABV is said to have generated much tension within the Socialist Party, and is expected to steal votes from it in future elections.

Actually, that is not necessarily the case, since whoever is behind the BSP in terms of backstage deals, is probably also behind the ABV as an alternative project to keep political influence even when the BSP is in a state of knock-down.

There have been various indications that the BSP has been involved in creating alternative or satellite political formations in the past, or that at least it has been intertwined with such in one way or another. The Tsar's party, the NMSP, which won the 2001 general elections in a landslide in a time when the older opposition, the BSP was in no position to win them, might have had this kind of connections with the Socialists; the so called conservative party RZS (Order, Law, Justice) is a political engineering project of the BSP, according to a senior Socialist leader.

So the BSP and a future ABV party would just be of the same breed, nothing else. The Socialist Party continues to be widely discredited with the voters, so the guys in charge – why are probably not even part of the BSP formally – are pulling out a new trump card from their sleeve – and building upon the relative popularity of President Parvanov.

Yet, the ABV project appears to have much less messianic potential for landslide election victories than the NMSP in 2001 or the GERB party in 2009. The old faces in it are one of the reasons for that; the affiliation with the BSP and the three-way coalition government of 2005-2009 designed by Parvanov is another reason.

It is still very early to say how an ABV party will do – in the local and presidential elections in 2011 – or in parliamentary elections, which matter most. The formation might grow to be very vocal and very powerful. As I claimed in a previous editorial, the clash of the titans in Bulgarian politics - Borisov vs. Parvanov - is on.

But chances are that unless the Borisov Cabinet messes up really badly, and if the international economic environment depresses the modest Bulgarian economic recovery, the best an ABV party could hope to achieve in terms of political influence in the near future is some kind of parity with Borisov's GERB.

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