Tag Archives: andrew moore

Bulgaria

Bulgaria election results: Borissov returns to power after 1.5-year break

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Pity poor Bulgaria. It has the lowest GDP per capita of the entire European Union (around $7,300). It has lost over 19% of its population from its 1988 peak. It is now struggling through the latest European financial crisis with a series of revolving governments, low economic growth and an unemployment rate that today is still over 11%.bulgaria flag

So when Bulgarians voted on Sunday to elect yet another government, they did do so with the same kind of ennui that’s marked so many of the country’s recent, frequent elections and a sense of hopelessness as the country’s youngest, brightest minds look to Germany, London and elsewhere for work.

Boyko Borissov (pictured above), a former center-right prime minister between 2009 and May 2013, is set to return to the office he once held, following a technocratic, center-left government headed by former finance minister Plamen Oresharski that fell in August. Bulgaria has since been governed by another caretaker, Georgi Bliznashki, who warned that Bulgaria’s next government needs to be strong enough to carry through major reforms to pull the country out of its ‘post-communist swamp.’

Borissov is the leader of the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB, Граждани за европейско развитие на България), and his main opponent is the Coalition for Bulgaria (Коалиция за България), which is essentially a wider version of the center-left. Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP, Българска социалистическа партия).

The Bulgarian Socialists won enough seats in the last election in May  to form a governing coalition with the  Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS, Движение за права и свободи), a liberal party that represents ethnic Turks and other Muslims.

Among the mounting problems that the government faced was the collapse of Bulgaria’s fourth-largest bank earlier this summer, Corporate Commercial Bank, which froze the accounts of 200,000 Bulgarians. Protests against the government last year failed to result in any substantive change.

This time around, however, they fell far lower, as GERB seemed headed to a clear victory. With just over 42% of the vote counted early Monday morning, GERB led by a margin of over two-to-one:

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Bulgarians voted Sunday to elect all 240 members of the unicameral National Assembly (Народно събрание), and early results indicated that four new groups would enter the parliament, doubling  the number of parties from four to eight.

In fourth place, however, is a potential coalition partner for GERB, the Reformist Bloc (Реформаторски блок), formed in December 2013 as a liberal electoral bloc that, like GERB, lies on the center-right, that won attention in May’s European parliamentary elections when it won one of Bulgaria’s seats. Together, GERB and the Reformist bloc will hold nearly 45% of the seats in the National Assembly, depending on whether another small group, the Alternative for Bulgarian Development, remains above the 4% threshold needed for winning seats.

That means that Bulgaria’s next government is unlikely to be strong enough to effect the kind of massive reforms that could transform policy on a scale sufficient to stop the country’s economic, cultural and demographic hemorrhaging.  Continue reading Bulgaria election results: Borissov returns to power after 1.5-year break →

Cuba

John Jeremiah Sullivan’s sparkling NYTimes article on Cuba

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I meant to link to this last week, but John Jeremiah Sullivan for a while has been one of my favorite new essayists on American life.  He captures contemporary U.S. culture as well as any other writer today.

He’s taken his eye to Cuba (his wife in Cuban, so he’s made multiple trips to the island) in a sparkling piece in the New York Times Magazine that examines Cuba from an American perspective, but from a three-dimensional way that recognizes the problems with the U.S. embargo of Cuba (a half-century and running) without apologizing for Fidel and Raúl Castro that also manages to be just as much about the United States and Americans as it is about Cuba and the Cubans:

You know when you’re meeting a Canadian, because they always ask, in the same shocked tone, “How did you get into the country?” It’s an opportunity to remind you that you can’t go legally, and they can. And by extension, that they come from a more enlightened land. “You need to grow up about that stuff,” one guy that I met at a nature preserve said, to which I wanted to tell him to get a large and powerful population of Cuban exiles and move them into an election-determining province of Canada and call me in the morning….

God, the human body! It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter the age or body type. You would never see a poolside scene in the United States with people showing this much skin, except at a pool where people were there precisely to show off the perfection of their bodies. The body not consciously sculptured through working out has become a secret shame and grotesquerie in America, but this upper-class Euro-Latin crowd had not received that news, to my distraction.

If you haven’t read it already, it’s worth your time.  And the accompanying photos are mesmerizing (see above from photographer Andrew Moore) — Moore has been traveling to Cuba since 1998, and his photos of late-Castro Cuba are spectacular.  His book, Cuba, comes out next week.