In this book Martin Marinos explores various aspects of the media presence of Bulgaria’s right-wing populist parties, especially Ataka. It consists of an Introduction, and chapters on the role of the party-controlled media under communism (Ch. 1), the pluralization of these media after 1989 (Ch. 2), the tabloidization of the press in the 1990s (Ch. 3), the rise of commercial television (Ch. 4), media concentration (Ch. 5), and the stylistic and performative aspects of populism (Ch. 6).

Undoubtedly, Marinos raises issues that are intellectually important and politically relevant: important, because the question of how populists use media in pursuit of power is worthy of scholarly attention, and relevant because Bulgarian populists have recently scored significant political successes. The author’s most admirable accomplishment, therefore, is to articulate a promising research agenda structured around a “holistic analysis” that carefully maps “a concrete socioeconomic context” (2), and deploys a “multimethod approach” in order to examine “the organizational structure of Far-Right movements and their internal dynamics” and ultimately explain “what populism is and does” (3).

Unfortunately, the agenda is not systematically pursued. The author’s main argument is that “the only freedom the media … seem to have gained after 1989 is the freedom to hate”—and to say that this bombastic, rather un-holistic statement is inaccurate would be an understatement. As the book makes it clear, many Bulgarian journalists enthusiastically exercise the liberty they acquired in 1989 and eagerly criticize their country’s governments, elites, politicians, parties, policies, and geopolitical alliances.

The main problem with the book is that instead of following lines of inquiry that might help us better understand “what populism is and does,” Marinos digresses into lengthy polemics and introduces distracting subplots, which is why the arc of his narratives and analyses is very hard to trace. A good example is Ch. 2 where, rather than focus on the rhetorical strategies and modes of communication typical for populist venues, he excoriates Bulgaria’s state-owned media because of their alleged “hostility toward leftist politics” (82). Similarly, in Ch. 5 Marinos introduces Angel Dzhambazki, one of Bulgaria’s most repugnant racists, and then devotes the bulk of the chapter not to an exploration of his positioning in the organizational structures and internal dynamics of populist circles, but to a tortured defense of the proposition that a mainstream media conglomerate, Economedia, receives funding from the America-for-Bulgaria Foundation, and is therefore “uninterested in the plight of the majority of the people,” 180. Whether true or not, this proposition seems completely unrelated to any in-depth examination of populists’ hatreds.

Another problem is that it is fairly easy to identify huge gaps in the author’s knowledge of Bulgarian right-wing populists. One of his contentions is that there is an affinity between them and “neoliberals,” and he defends it by asserting that “since entering the Bulgarian parliament in 2005, there is not a sliver of evidence that Ataka and its spin-offs pose a challenge to neoliberalism” (21). Obviously, Marinos is unaware of two of the most important dimensions of Ataka’s media presence, the nationally televised parliamentary speeches of its leaders, and its widely circulated election-campaign materials. Had he studied the speeches, Marinos would have learned that the party’s leader, Volen Siderov, denounced “neoliberal capitalism” as “a criminal regime” responsible for “a genocide against the Bulgarian people” (parliamentary speech, 11/24/2016). Had he studied the campaign materials—such as Siderov’s Plan Against Colonial Slavery (56)—he would have understood that Ataka prioritizes the nationalization of “heavy industry, machine-building, banking, communications, the energy sector, water supply, gas stations, and retail.” Undeniably, such positions reflect radical anti-neoliberalism.

The impression that the book is under-researched deepens as the reader encounters numerous errors in translations and transliterations from Bulgarian (“developed” in Bulgarian is “razvita,” not “razlichna” (52); the name of the TV program is “Vsiaka nedelja,” not “Visaka nedelja” (90); the name of the Sofia square is “Slaveikov,” not “Salveikov” (198), as well as factual mistakes (Imre Nagy was reburied in 1989, not in 1988; in the early 1990s Ivaylo Znepolski served as MP for the BSP, not the UDF).

The book is also marred by numerous inconsistences. Just one example: in Ch.1 Marinos asserts that before 1989 many Bulgarians sought help from regime-owned media because they expected journalists “to advocate for them,” but that after 1989 this “relationship of trust unraveled” (65, 67). His Ch. 4 makes it clear, however, that this “unraveling” did not take place: therein the author explains that in the 2000s a private TV channel was “overwhelmed” by “the sheer volume of signals” sent by its viewers.

Lamentably, then, the ambitious agenda outlined in the Introduction has not been realized. Martinos’ analyses of the tropes, modes of emplotment, and narratives conjured up in right-wing populist media is rather perfunctory, which is why his book makes only very modest contributions to the growing and increasingly sophisticated literature on Bulgarian populism.