Bulgaria’s NGO Sector Had a Hard Time under Outgoing PM Borisov. Here’s Why
The premiership of Boyko Borisov enabled attempts to restrain activists and civil society actors. His government resigned in May a year after citizens denounced endemic corruption.
Originally published in May 2021.
“A few Sorosoid NGOs and parties that are not even in the parliament want to grab power and ruin the state. And for what? To introduce gay marriage and create a gender republic. I’m sorry, but I don’t agree,” Krassimir Karakachanov told Vesti, a Bulgarian news website, during last year’s demonstrations against the Bulgarian government. Karakachanov served as deputy prime minister until last month. IMRO — the nationalist party he leads — was part of a coalition government headed by former PM Boyko Borisov and the majority, pro-EU GERB party.
“George Soros is the devil in this part of the world,” said Krasimira Velichkova, a Bulgarian activist, with a smirk on her face. She leads a philanthropy platform for domestic foundations called the Bulgarian Donors’ Forum. “We may not have people in jail or prosecuted and organisations closed like in Russia, Poland or Hungary. But if you look beneath the surface, you can see how the language of public officials is turning our civil society into a scapegoat: ‘the bad people ruining our traditions and Bulgaria’s national identity.’”
A number of corruption scandals involving Borisov, public officials, oligarchs, money-laundering allegations and the misuse of EU funds piled up during GERB’s time in power, and public discontent erupted last summer. The world’s attention was somewhere else when Bulgaria’s anti-corruption movement took to the streets of Sofia to call for the resignation of the government and the chief public prosecutor. Europe was facing a deadly first wave of Covid-19 cases, and racial protests were shaking the US and expanding to other Western countries after the killing of George Floyd.
Three months into the protests, IMRO proposed amendments to an existing law that required civil society organisations — including the Bulgarian Donors’ Forum — to reveal sources of foreign funding and removed the state’s obligation to fund CSO projects. The proposal also allowed the country’s anti-fraud agency to conduct financial inspections at CSOs without proof of wrongdoing, and opened the possibility to terminate NGOs amid minor breaches of the law. Had these amendments — which Velichkova calls “a more-or-less copy of the Russian law on foreign agents” — been approved, conditions for nongovernmental organisations in Bulgaria would be extremely adverse, Velichkova told DISRUPT.
“It has always been a fight. I don’t remember a situation where it’s been healthy or calm to work for a civil society organisation,” says Velichkova. “In the last ten years, we almost didn’t have a chance to develop new projects, because we are always busy dealing with unfair regulations that they have tried to implement.” Parliament rejected IMRO’s proposal after a coalition of civil society groups sent a public letter — the third one in the past 18 months — to the European Commission. A year before, IMRO had asked the chief public prosecutor to shut down the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, the largest human rights NGO in the country.
NGOs on target
In 2018, Bulgaria’s Constitutional Court rejected the ratification of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty designed to combat domestic and gender-based violence. Members of the political establishment — including GERB and the Bulgarian Socialist Party — had opposed the treaty, while a smear campaign ensued against women’s rights groups that promoted the treaty’s adoption. A fact-finding mission by the UN’s monitor on violence against women found that opposition to the Istanbul Convention led to the creation of an “anti-gender movement” and backlash against organisations that provide services to victims of domestic violence.
“People began to think that if the treaty was adopted, Bulgaria would question the concepts of biological sex, men and women, and traditional family,” said Velichkova. “We saw waves of fear over people thinking that schools would teach children about gender and that different genders would take over the country. Children call each other ‘gender’ as an insult nowadays.”
The state’s child protection agency also announced in 2018 that it would take control of a national helpline for children that was previously run by independent agencies. Velichkova claims that rumours began circulating that child-support NGOs were paid to steal kids from their families. The World Health Organization, while working with victim-support NGO Animus, said last year that little coordination exists between the government and civil society organisations. Around 25% of cases of violence against women are children are reported in Bulgaria — one of the lowest reporting rates in the EU, according to the Center for the Study of Democracy.
“Now there’s growing suspicion not only against organizations that assist victims of domestic violence, but also those protecting children,” she said. “They start with gossip related to a specific group, which becomes louder and louder to the point that people accept it as the truth and no longer question these narratives.”
Media groups linked to oligarchs have also been accused of attempting to discredit activists. For instance, environmentalists dedicated to the protection of the Pirin National Park, a UNESCO heritage site, claim to have been smeared by Trud, a leading national daily. Media entrepreneur and editor Petio Blaskov took over the newspaper using credit from a bank that has financed the construction of a ski resort in the Pirin Mountains. A court ruling in 2019 blocked the expansion of the ski resort.
“Environmental organisations are widely supported by the population, and they are very effective at organizing protests, raising awareness and litigating against plans to build in green and public areas,” says Velichkova. In fact, last year’s protests were triggered when Hristo Ivanov, an opposition politician and activist, confronted the bodyguards of Ahmed Dogan, an ally of Borisov that was treating a public beach as his own.
EU looking the other way?
Three decades after the downfall of communist regimes, abuses and attacks against civic actors independent from the state are no longer a rarity in Eastern European countries, even those with an EU membership. In his obsession with the notorious philanthropist, Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán has openly said that Soros-funded NGOs have to be exposed. His party’s anti-Soros legislation criminalizes NGOs that help refugees to obtain legal status, while dissidents and those who allegedly work for “Soros organisations” are routinely smeared by ruling party officials and pro-government media outlets. In Poland, the state now has the monopoly over NGO funding and progressive NGOs have consequent lost financial support. In 2017, a year after the first demonstrations against a proposal to ban abortion in any scenario, President Andrzej Duda ordered a police raid into the headquarters of two women’s rights organisations.
Abuses and attacks against civil society could have been prevented if European institutions had taken a tougher line on Orbán’s Fidesz party or GERB, according to critics. In February, the former quit the European People’s Party — the centre-right coalition that controls the European Parliament — but the latter remains within. The party of Ahmed Dogan, whose bodyguards sparked the anti-corruption demonstrations last summer, is part of the liberal European umbrella Renew.
Continental heavyweights such as Angela Merkel or Ursula von der Leyen have not been vocal about accusations of corruption and power abuse by Borisov’s government. Bulgaria is an external border of the EU and plays a key role in migration, security and relations with Turkey and Russia — European leaders preferred to cooperate with Borisov’s government to maintain stability than to speak out against Bulgaria’s domestic issues.
“With GERB we started to live in a façade democracy where the government officials were running huge corruption schemes, most of them related to the management of EU funds,” Yotova told DISRUPT. “The protests raised awareness among European citizens about the kind of regime, supported by the EU, which we had in Bulgaria. The people that see this now question the values that the EU is supposed to stand for.”
In a parliamentary hearing in May, a business executive said that Borisov once showed him a video of a man, who had refused to hand his company over to the government, being raped in prison. Three weeks later, it was revealed that the chief public prosecutor had been living in a state-owned mansion paid with taxpayers’ money.
“The national institutions designed to guard the law were turned into a bat that could be used to threaten businesses and individuals,” said Velichkova. “Borisov is gone for now and the EU did very little to help us. In the end, we Bulgarians are responsible for cleaning our own mess.”
