The terms “left” and “right” are frequently endowed with what Norberto Bobbio described as axiological meaning and deployed as synonyms of good and evil.Footnote 1 They are then frequently built into interpretations of modern political conflict that pits Leftists, portrayed as idealistic progressives on an emancipatory mission, against Rightists, depicted as fiendish villains scheming to inflict pain on broad swaths of their societies.
Fans of such Manicheism-tinged Lyotard-esque grand narratives should disregard the text that follows because its central argument will strike them as very irritating. The argument is that the politics of Ataka, an influential populist party whose presence has had a profoundly negative impact on Bulgarian democracy, should be thought of as a form of left-wing radicalism. In order to defend this perspective, however, I will use the term “left” in its descriptive sense, as a label that purports to capture not moral worth but political positions. It is impossible to discuss here the array of beliefs that constitute the radical Left's Weltanschauung, but three ideas undoubtedly belong to its core: 1) free markets are a destructive force that must be neutralized by strong, omnipresent states; 2) the west is responsible for humankind's misfortunes because it is the powerbase of colonizers and imperialists who victimize the rest of the world by coercively sustaining on a global scale something called “neoliberal hegemony”; and 3) liberal democracy should be looked upon with suspicion because it serves as a façade concealing and legitimating the merciless exploitation of toiling masses by profit-seeking elites.
I contend that in the course of its evolution Ataka has increasingly embraced similar ideas and it is these ideas that propel its populism. “Populism” is, of course, an elastic term with elusive meaning.Footnote 2 To make it useful, analysts must contextualize it and situate it in a coherent interpretative framework—which is precisely why I insist that Bulgarian populism should be construed as an example of the type of left-wing radicalism that reconfigures political landscapes in post-accession eastern Europe. My argument defies the conventional wisdom according to which the dangers of populism stem exclusively from the rise of right-wing ideologies—and seeks to ignite an intellectually more diverse conversation about the perils of the anti-status-quo mobilizations that are currently sweeping across the Old Continent.
I.
Ataka burst onto the Bulgarian political scene in 2005. Led by Volen Siderov, a popular TV talk-show host, it instantly gained the reputation of a populist party able to articulate the people's disenchantment with established elites.Footnote 3 Predictions that its appeal will quickly fade were proven wrong: since its debut Ataka has won seats in every popularly-elected Bulgarian legislature, and on several occasions sent deputies to the European parliament.Footnote 4 Even though Ataka has never won national elections, it is indisputably a paradigmatic example of populist success.
At the beginning, it was nationalistic xenophobia that characterized Ataka's political presence. Siderov publicly inveighed against Bulgaria's Turkish and Roma minorities and portrayed himself as the protector of a beleaguered nation threatened by “Turkification” and “Gypsification.” A preliminary issue to be addressed, therefore, is whether Ataka should be described as right-wing party because of its nationalism. Is it not true that it is right-wing radicals who assault ethnic minorities, whereas the Left has a distinguished historical record of defending them? Yes, this is generally true—but not in the Balkans. Throughout the 1980s, it was precisely bona fide Marxist organizations in that region—the Bulgarian Communist Party, the Romanian Communist Party, The League of Communists of Serbia—that implemented discriminatory policies against their countries’ minorities (Turkish, Hungarian, and Albanian, respectively). Notably, such policies were cheered by the Balkans’ most famous leftists. In the late 1980s Mihailo Marković, the Marxist guru of the once-fashionable Praxis group, propagated the idea that Kosovo should be stripped of its autonomy, because what would transpire otherwise, he maintained, was “a first and unique case of a region of a socialist state seceding and restoring bourgeois society.”Footnote 5 He then became a comrade-in-arms of Slobodan Milošević, a fellow Serb and a life-long gauchiste. During that same period Slavoj Žižek, global megastar of radical leftism, supported the “not-in-my-backyard” policies whereby the Slovenian government instantly disenfranchised 20,000 migrant workers.Footnote 6 Why leftist sensibilities got intertwined with polarizing ethnic politics in this region I cannot discuss here. My point is that in the Balkans displays of ethnic prejudice are perfectly compatible with an avowed commitment to progressive ideas. Given the peculiarities of regional context, therefore, Ataka cannot be considered “right-wing” simply on account of its nationalism.
Crucial for understanding Ataka's role as a populist trailblazer is that its political messages have evolved over time. Back in 2005 the party's programmatic document, “A Twenty-Point Platform,” was less than two pages long. Undoubtedly, the Platform is grounded in what Jan-Werner Müller calls “the logic of populism,” or a distinct way of filtering the political world through “a particular moralistic imagination of politics” that “sets a morally pure and fully unified people . . . against elites that are deemed corrupt or in some other way morally inferior.”Footnote 7 Ataka seeks to preserve the nation's purity by preaching anti-pluralism (“religious or ethnic differences cannot be put above national belonging,” “there should be strict sanctions for insults to anything that is sacred to the Bulgarian nation”), and to maintain its unity by vilifying the people's adversaries: governing elites, international financial institutions (“We should put an end to Bulgaria's dependence on the IMF and the World Bank”) and NATO (“Bulgaria should leave NATO”).Footnote 8 Still, at this early stage its ideology can only be described as—to use Michael Freeden's propitious term—“thin” nationalism: it “concentrates on the exceptional worth of a nation as the shaper of human identity” and seeks to define “the demands a nation can make on the conduct of its members,” but “it does little else,” specifically it “does not produce a scheme for the just distribution of scarce and vital goods.”Footnote 9 Circa 2005, then, it was neither right-wing nor left-wing leanings but eclecticism that distinguished Ataka's ideas.Footnote 10
Today the situation is different. Ataka's political vision is laid out in a six-page manifesto, New Path for Bulgaria (hereafter NP) and a 144-page pamphlet, Siderov's Plan Against Colonial Slavery (hereafter SP), and in comparison with the original Platform they are much more sophisticated.Footnote 11 NP offers a coherent narrative summary of the Bulgarian people's postcommunist experiences, and this narrative should be familiar both to those who follow scholarly writings on postcommunism and to regular readers of The Nation, Dissent, and New Left Review: “Globalization failed. Monetarism failed. . . The liberal credo “less government, the market should decide everything” failed . . . The neoliberal doctrine and rapid and total privatizations in the former socialist countries pushed more than 100 million East-Europeans into abject poverty.”Footnote 12 The document also contains scornful references to Francis Fukuyama (“apologist of capitalist fundamentalism”) and Milton Friedman (“guru of monetarism and neoliberalism”); condemnations of Wall Street (“not more Wall Street, but more reason, balance, and justice”); and denunciations of “the market fundamentalism which the financial and political elites ruling the United States turned into a religion.”Footnote 13 The main grievance Ataka vents is no longer that ethnic minorities subvert the nation's Bulgarian-ness; it is that “the economic model of the country is defective.”Footnote 14
SP further concretizes the general claim that the Bulgarian nation has suffered from savage marketization. Bulgarians’ hopes for prosperity were brutally dashed after 1989 because “the IMF and World Bank began pressuring [Bulgarian governments] for total privatization, shrinkage of the public sector . . . and radical opening of financial and other markets to the gigantic corporations and stock market speculators”—and as a result “the presence of the state in the economy was liquidated” (SP, 14, 19). Among the fatalities of this marketization are the industrial sector (“once the deadly memorandum with the IMF and World Bank was signed” what ensued was “complete abandonment of the idea of industrial development,” SP, 51), healthcare (“the introduction of markets in the health-sector system drastically reduced the quality of health services and deprived the majority of Bulgarian citizens of proper care,” SP, 37); the environment (“Bulgaria's environment suffered heavily as a result of the criminal transition from socialism to capitalism,” SP, 47); and art (“in the absence of decisive state intervention Bulgarian art was foredoomed to undergo a painful death,” SP, 67).
The way out of the nation's predicament is amply illuminated: “radical change of the economic model—from neoliberal market fundamentalism to a strong regulatory state promoting social justice!” (NP, 3). What such a state should do is re-nationalize privatized assets and then decree a “drastic and immediate increase of incomes” (NP, 6). It must also liquidate unemployment by means of a government-funded job-creation program—a policy identical to the one outlined in Syriza's Thessaloniki Programme, an exemplary 21st-century leftist manifesto.Footnote 15 In short, the leitmotif that runs through the most important policy document of Bulgarian populism is de-marketization: where laissez-faire wreaked havoc, the state should intervene to restore the nation's well-being.
Ataka's programmatic documents are sprinkled with professions of faith in “Bulgarian business,” which raises the following question: what does “Bulgarian business” mean exactly? Business owned by ethnic Bulgarians, business headquartered in Bulgaria—or something else? In order to provide an accurate and informative answer to this key question we need to remember the distinction that Katherine Verdery once drew between nationalization and etatization.Footnote 16 Verdery's insight is that even though “nationalization” and “etatization” might be perceived, and are frequently used, as synonyms, they could be propelled by different political logics. Building upon Verdery's insight, one might say that power-holders who want to “nationalize” declare that important assets belong to a particular ethnic group, then seize these assets in order to deprive members of other ethnic groups of access to them, and eventually create the kind of institutional-legal framework that would ensure that they are managed by individuals with the “proper” ethnic background. In contrast, politicians who “etatize” declare that important assets belong to a state (construed, a la Weber, as an amalgam of administrative agencies), then seize these assets in order to deprive private individuals of access to them, and eventually ensure that they are managed by government officials.
Approached through this distinction, Ataka's stance can only be described as economic etatism, not economic nationalism. While SR never addresses the question of business owners’ ethnic background, it makes it abundantly clear that “Bulgarian business” means a joint venture in which the government possesses 51% ownership and private firms the rest (SR, 108). Moreover, Ataka's etatism is nothing if not ambitious: the state must own “heavy industry, machine-building . . . banking, communications, the energy sector, water supply, gas stations, and retail” and the government's managerial activities must be overseen by “a high ranking official who should be tasked with the implementation and enforcement of Ataka's [economic] policies” (SP, 57, 56). Obviously, such policies are not directly intended to fortify the economic dominance of ethnic Bulgarians but to create government-controlled economic units and conglomerates—which in turn means that Bulgarian populists’ credo is not that what makes a business Bulgarian is the ethnicity of its owners (a stance that might be characterized as right-wing) but the fact that at any point in time it might be ordered to disregard market signals and carry out the commands of patriotic public officials.
More generally, Ataka's notion of a domineering state bears only minimal resemblance to the rightist vision of a paternalistic Leviathan that protects national culture, traditions, and identity. It is shaped instead by the leftist understanding that governments ought to be economic super-agents that control assets, manage resources, and redirect monetary flows. Domestically such a state should be the sole source of economic dynamism; on the international arena, its priority should be to resist the colonial schemes of the west.
II.
One of the easiest ways to determine whether a radical is right-wing or left-wing is to ask them what it is that they dislike about the west. A distinctly rightist anti-west tradition—which arguably can be traced back to Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals—is propelled by the idea that west is decaying because of its liberalism. Societies which embrace liberalism lose their spirituality and are cast adrift amidst the swamps of mindless consumerism; they are also existentially unmoored and fatally weakened by an ill-conceived tolerance which renders them incapable of defending themselves against virile outsiders.Footnote 17 In contrast, left-wing radicals hate the west because in their political imagination it appears as an exploitative “core” that relentlessly disseminates capitalist practices around the world in order to ensnare “peripheries” into asymmetrical economic relations and thus ensure that the rich grow richer while the poor become poorer.Footnote 18
Today in eastern Europe there are populist politicians who borrow from the right-wing anti-western gospel—for example, Viktor Orban lambasts the vacuous western cosmopolitanism that imperils Hungarians’ sense of rootedness, and the Law and Justice Party juxtaposes the west's hollow secularism to Poland's robust Christian piety. Ataka is different. Elements of this gospel are not completely absent from its messages—but obviously it finds it more effective to assume the role of the nation's bulwark against western capitalism. As already mentioned, SP’s title contains the expression “against colonial slavery”; the first sentence of the document is “Bulgaria has been colonized since 1997.” The choice of a cut-off date is revealing. Unlike elsewhere in eastern Europe, in Bulgaria it was not in 1989 but in 1997 that the former communists ultimately lost their grip on power and the electorate endorsed the opposition's plan of joining the west.Footnote 19 From Ataka's vantage point, the abandonment of the state-socialist project entrapped Bulgaria in “the plan of the world's masters from Washington [which] was carried out by means of their instruments for colonizing various states around the world, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO [World Trade Organization],” (SP, 14). Ataka depicts the west not as the instigator of a pernicious mission civilisatrice threatening Bulgarians’ mores, religion, or national identity, but as the habitat of capitalist invaders bent upon looting the country. In fact, SP’s first 30 pages contain no references to Turks or Roma; but they do contain a long list of western companies—Kaufland, Billa, Lidl, Carrefour—that allegedly rip off Bulgarians on a daily basis. In other words, Bulgarian populists’ anti-western animus is not driven primarily by cultural grievances—they obsess about what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, authors of a progressivist bestseller, identified as an essential aspect of “empire”: “the decline in sovereignty of nation states” created a situation where “capital seems to be faced with a smooth world.”Footnote 20
Ataka's anti-colonial rhetoric reached a remarkable climax in one of Siderov's most important recent speeches. When in late 2016 the Bulgarian parliament considered a possible criminalization of public displays of communist symbols, he announced that his party might be willing to discuss the measure only if the legislative body adds to its agenda an Ataka-sponsored draft that declared that “neoliberal capitalism is a criminal regime” responsible for “a genocide against the Bulgarian people.”Footnote 21 The demand that neoliberalism should be criminalized is clearly intended to enhance Ataka's reputation as the nation's only vigilant guardian; undeniably, it also reflects radical-left opinions about humankind's predicament.
Furthermore, it is precisely one's attitudes towards the west that Ataka deploys as a paramount criterion when it endeavors to substantiate “the core claim of populism,” namely that “only some of the people are really the people.”Footnote 22 As SN explains, what disqualifies individuals and groups from being part of “the real Bulgarian people” is not their ethnicity or their brazenly corrupt behavior—it is complicity with the “colonial project”: “The main cleavage dividing [Bulgaria] pits the traitors of the people—those who serve foreign colonial interests—against those who are faithful to the people and fighters against foreign colonial interests” (SP, 27). Hence, decisive actions are necessary in order to excise from the community of authentic Bulgarians social constituencies that plea for more westernization and political actors willing to heed that plea.
The problem Ataka faces, however, is that sweet talk about democracy befogs the need for such decisive actions—which is why Bulgarian populists’ feelings about this regime type are marked by palpable antipathy.
III.
The simplest way to distinguish between moderate and radical leftists is to inquire about their views on liberal democracy. As Sheri Berman has demonstrated, moderate center-left social-democrats made unique contributions towards the consolidation of liberal democracy in post-WWII Europe.Footnote 23 During that period, this type of polity elicited among radical leftists negative attitudes that ranged from deep skepticism to ferocious hostility. In the words of Slavoj Žižek, liberal democracy is but a “fetish,” and a “repetition of the Leninist gesture today” might be necessary in order to “break” it and resume humankind's forward march toward social justice.Footnote 24
As Ivan Krastev has pointed out, it would be simplistic to describe populists’ success as “a victory for anti-democratic attitudes.”Footnote 25 Ataka's activists rarely argue that democracy is inherently flawed. NP’s last sentence reads: “One thing is necessary: power should be in the right hands” (7). Conceivably, this desirable state of affairs might emerge as the outcome of normal democratic procedures. Lamentably, such procedures routinely distort the voice of the true people and rarely ensure patriots’ triumph. That is why for Ataka, Bulgarian democracy's actual functioning remains deeply problematic.
In its original platform, Ataka had already articulated a key populist idea analyzed by Pierre Rosanvallon, namely that representative systems are “structurally corrupt” and should be replaced by referenda.Footnote 26 Today its preferred method for disparaging democracy is to argue that it is a side-show which obscures the essential truth about postcommunism: what the people expected in 1989 was liberty and a prosperous future; what they got instead was ruinous capitalism. Unmasking democracy as a dangerous distraction and refocusing voters’ attention on the nation's real problems is a key part of Ataka's strategy for broadening its base beyond the nationalists who backed it in 2005.
Numerous examples of how Bulgarian populists thrash democracy might be adduced—in the above-mentioned speech, for example, Siderov argued that 1989 was freedom's false dawn followed by a neoliberal nightmare, and an identical theme runs through a documentary on the post-89 transformations frequently broadcasted on Ataka's TV channel.Footnote 27 But among the most striking examples is a 2016 parliamentary speech delivered by Stanislav Stanilov, Ataka's deputy-chairman and resident-intellectual (he holds a history PhD and has authored several scholarly books). The speech began with the familiar complaint that disloyal Bulgarian citizens with Turkish backgrounds might abuse their voting rights in order to advance the interests of Turkey. It is a safe bet that had Stanilov delivered the same speech ten years ago, he would have raised no additional points in order to boost his credentials as a Bulgarian nationalist. By 2016, however, the rhetorical-ideological context had evolved. Having demanded that some Turkish constituencies be stripped of their right to vote, Stanilov turned to a discussion of the principles invoked to defend minorities, “democracy, constitutionalism, and rights.” Those he identified, correctly, as “western values”—and then proudly announced “I do not accept [such] Euro-Atlantic values.” Ideas like democracy should be critiqued, he asserted, in part because they amount to nothing more than an excuse for “looting, corruption, and a licentious free-for-all”—but mostly because they lent legitimacy to the transplantation of a neoliberal order on Bulgarian soil. And, Stanilov concluded with aplomb, therein lies the real tragedy, because “neoliberalism is fascism, a system which values money more than people.”Footnote 28
At first glance it might appear that the way Stanilov mixes together claims about treacherous ethnic minorities, the phoniness of western values, and the fascist nature of neoliberalism signifies nothing but the annoying mish-mash-ness of populist rhetoric. A more careful analysis of what he has to say, however, would reveal that the apparently random finger-wagging is grounded in a logic which is easy to explicate.
The term “fascism” is thrown as a bomb in order to create a perception of crisis—a typical populist gesture whereby the champions of the people seek to “radically simplify the terms and tenor of political debates” and legitimate “the demand to act decisively and immediately.”Footnote 29 But what exactly is the nature of the crisis? In a hugely popular anti-capitalist treatise, Naomi Klein argued that democratic procedures are regularly used to stealthily impose free markets by means of “the most brutal forms of coercion infected on the collective body politic.”Footnote 30 Stanilov follows the same line of reasoning. His diagnosis is not devoid of nationalist overtones—he insists that the misdeeds of ethnic Turks threaten the existence of the Bulgarian people. But this is a secondary theme, a hypothetical scenario that conjures up events which are yet to happen. What is happening right now, in contrast, is the carnage caused by neoliberal fascism. It is the highfalutin talk about democracy that both empowers the nation's domestic enemies and also obfuscates the fact that what was unleashed in the 1990s was the plague of capitalism.
With regards to democracy, then, Ataka's position is clear: it is a fool's gold that the Bulgarian people were given as an anesthetic while being fatally infected with neoliberal fascism. The gullible and the deceitful might insist that what transpired after 1989 is the consolidation of Bulgarian democracy. The enlightened champions of the people know better: whatever democracy's virtues in abstract, in practice in post-1989 eastern Europe it was used as the reassuringly soft cloth which fascist-neoliberal wolves donned in order to look like sheep.
IV.
Just like any other analytical tool, the left-right interpretative framework has its limitations: it fails to elucidate many important aspects of postcommunist politics.Footnote 31 I submit, however, that it adequately captures the ideological dimensions of the rise of Bulgarian populism—a phenomenon fueled by radical-left ideas. Initially a typical nationalist formation, Ataka has been able to magnify its appeal by assaulting laissez-faire, demonizing the west, and trouncing the democratic process. It discursively constructs a notion of “normalcy” which conjures up a massively interventionist state and emphasizes the government's duty to isolate the people from the vagaries of capitalism, guarantee middle-class prosperity through administrative programs, and ensure the triumph of social justice. And it considers itself a part of “the rising tide of discontent and actions countering the supranational financial oligarchy” and a proud participant in “the nationalist and anti-globalist movements [that] demand more state regulation, more state presence in the economy and [the narrowing] of the gap separating the super-rich from the masses,” (SP, 27).
What conclusions does the foregoing analysis warrant? For reasons of space I cannot fully explore Ataka's impact (such as how its success triggered the emergence of copycat populist formations, and how its behavior affected non-populist parties and reshaped mainstream political discourses). I will therefore offer one more general observation and two comments on current Bulgarian politics. The general observation is that today the critique of neoliberalism has become an intellectual McDonald's: a boilerplate commodity eagerly devoured by mass consumers around the globe.Footnote 32 Scholars might have hoped that neoliberalism will serve as a cornerstone concept undergirding reasoned, methodologically astute, theoretically engrossing exchanges—the kind of word that provides “one safe gate into the temple of certainty.”Footnote 33 Instead, the term has become a source of obfuscations, mystifications, and simplifications which crafty entrepreneurs exploit as they wish. The seemingly rational rhetoric of anti-neoliberalism might have been intended to replace the mindless scapegoating of particular groups with more serious analyses; what transpired instead is a situation which, with a nod to Julien Benda, we might call “the intellectual reorganization of political hatreds.”Footnote 34 Old forms of scapegoating have been supplemented and even eclipsed by new forms of scapegoating—those that target “neoliberals.”
This general observation is directly linked to my first comment about Bulgaria: Ataka-type populism has already engendered new forms of exclusion and marginalization in that country. As Cass Mudde reminds us, the notion that right-wing populism is always exclusionary but its left-wing counterpart is by definition inclusionary is fallacious: “the main difference between them is not whether they exclude, but whom they exclude.”Footnote 35 The logic of left-wing exclusions is compellingly articulated by Ernesto Laclau: “A society which postulates the welfare state as its ultimate horizon” will have to confront “the obstacles identified during the establishment” of such a regime, expose its “enemies,” and “reintroduce a discourse of social division” that seeks to effectively suppress them.Footnote 36 Ataka relishes the opportunity to propagate such a “discourse of social division.” Having targeted ethnic minorities before, today it also condemns NGOs, independent media, political parties, and civic movements labeled “pro-western” or “pro-neoliberal.” As the appeal of Bulgarian populism seeps into mainstream politics, the status of such constituencies becomes ever more precarious. That they might be subject to physical or prosecutorial abuse is an eventuality that cannot be ruled out; but their more likely fate is emigration—internal or abroad. With such constituencies silenced, the space for populist politics in Bulgaria will continue to expand.
Secondly, Ataka's determination to posit the struggle against western capitalism as a patriotic duty poses a threat to Bulgarian democracy. Radical leftists excitedly juxtapose capitalism to liberal democracy with the hope that once the former becomes the focal point of noble resistance, the latter will metamorphose into something better (“substantive,” “socialist,” “economic” democracy). An alternative scenario is more plausible: radical-driven anti-status-quo mobilizations might turn liberal democracy into the focal point of destructive furies whereupon it will degenerate into something worse. What the future holds for Bulgarian democracy is, of course, impossible to predict—but one thing is clear: the rise of radical left-wing populism will repeatedly challenge Bulgarians’ commitment to liberal-democratic values and institutions.
