Are they reformed?

I am not a Socialist. Even less am I a Bulgarian Socialist. The transition in Bulgaria has been such a wayward, idiosyncratic exercise that I – as  one who caught the last years of communism but who has fought for democracy after coming of age afterwards – define myself as right-of-centre in Bulgaria and centre-left out of Bulgaria. I have spent time in London, Sarajevo and Belgrade, sufficient time. There, I felt comfortable with the centre-left option: I like Labour more than the Tories (and even the LibDems), I used to like the Social Democrats (SDP) in Bosnia and the Democrats (DS) in Serbia before they decided to ruin themselves. I also read a lot, and I think the social democratic parties in Europe are sensible.

After the Party of European Socialists (PES) elected the Bulgarian Socialist leader, Sergei Stanishev, as its head, I thought there was a real chance for reform in this decaying, oligarchic structure called the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). I thought – okay, this guy is of the same dough, a totalitarian child, Moscow-educated, hadn’t had a real job except party posts, but PES elected him as its chairman. Maybe this is a good sign: he will reform the party secretly from within. He rants about the usefulness of the Russian Belene nuclear power plant project, he seizes every opportunity to disgrace true centre-right reformists in Bulgaria, but after all he may be Europe’s secret weapon to reform my own Communists. Every person in the ex-Soviet bloc has their own Communists. Ask Kundera.

I have many Bulgarian Socialist friends. I admire them for their perseverance.

But Stanishev and his BSP now took a huge shit on both my friends’ beliefs and on my hopes that one day the Bulgarian left may be worth it. He appointed a mafia guy to take care of national security; he relies on the support of a far-right populist and Bulgarian neo-Nazi in parliament, even tolerating this guy’s appointment as head of the parliamentary ethics and anti-corruption committee; his foreign minister appoints former communist state security spies as chiefs at the ministry. He refuses to admit that there are tens-of-thousands-strong legitimate protests against him and the essence of this government taking place every single day in the capital. He says “these are only a couple of thousand of Sofians; it’s not Bulgaria.” It’s just like a quarter of a century ago, when his mother party invented the “Sofia citizenship” thing to separate people.

I am asking now – asking PES and all the people of Europe, for whose values I won’t stop fighting; Europe, our sacred home: Are they reformed?