The emergence of ·Attack” is a call to action for all other political forces Teodor DETCHEV* What was it that happened at the last elections? For the first time in history the proportional system functioned in the way it functions in other developed democracies that have accepted it. The proportional system has been adopted in many small European countries with the clear idea that it would lead to the election of fragmented parliaments, in which no party would have an absolute, much less a qualified, majority. Such parliaments form coalition governments, and most often endeavour to take relatively consensusbased decisions. The above statement has long since taken on the status of a law of politics, known as ·Duverger’s Law”, which states: ·The electoral system in a given country shapes the party system”. It has already been said that the proportional system in principle guarantees the maintenance of a multiparty system, with many players, none of whom, as a rule, are able to achieve an absolute majority. All of this illustrates the effect of Duverger’s Law. In the course of about 15 years, Bulgaria has been an exception. From 1994 to 2001, despite the proportional electoral system established in the Constitution, elections in this country led to the emergence of absolute majorities in parliament. The reason was in the peculiar nature of those elections. They were conducted in the form of referendums ·for” or ·against” the political elite in power at the time. In 1994 and 1997 the ·referendum” was along the lines of ·for” or ·against” the Bulgarian Socialist Party. In 2001 it evolved into ·for” or ·against” the entire political elite. For this reason we could say that for the first time, the proportional electoral system in Bulgaria has started working. Instead of accounting for the entry into parliament of seven parties as something resulting from the electoral system itself, i.e. as something natural (using the term ·normalisation” might be a bit hasty), the whole spectrum of political commentators raised a cry to the heavens, as if democracy were in danger. Democracy is not endangered by the fact that seven parties made into parliament and that the citizens WHO VOTED have maximum representation. Huge expenditures of intellectual, letter-writing and * Between 1998 and 2001 Teodor Detchev was deputy minister of labour and social policy in charge of industrial relations. In 2001 he was elected board member of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research. In 2001-2003 he was advisor to the chair of the Confederation of the Independent Trade Unions in Bulgaria. In 2003 he became an expert of the European Commission for Social Dialogue, and in 2004 he was among the co-founders of the Institute for Social Analyses and Policies. He is a member of the Bulgarian Political Sciences Association.
emotional effort were provoked by the entry of the ·Attack” coalition into parliament. It provoked statements beginning with ·It’s the beginning of a new Bulgarian Renaissance” to ·The fascists have made it into parliament”. The entry of ·Attack” was as predictable as it was underestimated. It was underestimated by political scientists as well as by the voters, and even by the sympathisers of and potential voters for ·Attack”. We may be sure that a significant number of voters likely to support ·Attack”, regardless of their motivations for doing so, did not vote in the last election, thinking the group would not make it over the four-percent threshold. In this sense, any proposal of annulling the election results and quickly holding new ones would only serve the very political power of ·Attack”. If a new vote were to be held soon, it would certainly result in an even better result for ·Attack” . It is clear that the entry of Volen Siderov’s people into the National Assembly resulted from the cumulative effect of the aggregation of votes that were given for all different reasons. Thus, for example, ·Attack” picked up the votes of all those, who disapprove of the closure of the third and fourth reactors of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant. Tempestuous public debates about the fate of the Kozloduy plant accomplished a great deal for ·Attack”, without their organisers ever intending it. Similarly, all the ·old” parties, like the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), left wide open the ·field” of the failures - of the people who feel downtrodden, of those who lost out during the transition years, of those who are frightened of the coming changes, of the European Union and of globalisation in general - by failing to address any messages to them. The ·Attack” slogans were music to the ears of many voters disgusted by the commercial trade with the votes of marginalised social strata, including the Roma. Even for people without any racist attitudes, the vote-buying provoked strong negative feelings, not only towards those buying the votes, but also towards the Roma who were selling them. Incidentally, none of the political parties learned the lesson from the partial election in Topolovgrad, where the BSP candidate who was confident of winning lost by a landslide after it became known that he had signed a political agreement with four Roma parties with unacceptable content. The agreement guaranteed the Roma leaders deputy mayor posts, new municipal positions as ·Roma experts in demographic and ethnic issues” and the right to have access to the forestry fund without oversight. Advertising ·Attack” as an anti-establishment party that rejects the entire political elite turned out to be a strong position. If there is any similarity between Jorg