Civil Society and Party Politics in Bulgaria after 2013: A Gramscian Look

Civil Society and the State: Gramsci’s Theory of Hegemony

For Antonio Gramsci, hegemony is a form of moral and intellectual leadership, whereby the wider population understands their own interests as being fundamentally compatible with the hegemonic social group (see, for example, Buttigieg, 1995), which grants them the legitimacy to hold state power. But it is only once a certain way of thinking and seeing the world has acquired hegemonic character in civil society that a political project built on it can become hegemonic, that is, become a political project that claims social, cultural and economic leadership (see also Thomas, 2013: 26–27). The success of a social group in acquiring and maintaining stable control over the modern state then depends on its influence over civil society. Gramsci’s civil society can thus be defined as a terrain of social (class) struggle between different groups vying for state power.

During periods of stable or ‘normal’ politics, state power is not open to contestation, but only government is (Riley, 2011): political struggles unfold on a ‘legal terrain’ (Gramsci, 1971: 256) – through elections and in parliament – while maintaining bureaucratic continuity. Unlike in times of normal politics, during periods of ‘organic crises’, political movements with competing visions of the state clash, effectively challenging the core of state power, that is, the bureaucratic ‘caste’ (Gramsci, 1971: 246). The variable at the heart of this distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ politics (Adamson, 1980: 627–628) is the relative strength of the dominant classes’ hegemony. To describe the struggles during such organic crises, Gramsci uses the military terms ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of position’. The first he defines as a frontal attack on state power, and the second as comprising political processes in preparation for the war of manoeuvre, which amount to a sort of cultural/intellectual struggle where one class pursues hegemony by establishing its own ‘common sense’ over other contenders for hegemony.

A Gramscian lens on the political dynamics in 2013 in Bulgaria can help us see the protest mobilisations of 2013 not only as a struggle against power-holders (since grievances were directed at the political and economic elites, who are perceived as opportunistic and corrupt) but also as hegemonic struggles between different social groups in the arena of civil society, for the reconstitution of civil society, that is, as part of a Gramscian positional warfare. I argue that at the root of the peculiar divisions and contention between different protesting groups which transpired in 2013 was the struggle to occupy strategic strongholds within civil society which would grant the victorious social group the legitimacy to launch a ‘war of manoeuvre’ for state power. The emergence of new political parties described later in this article can be seen as opportunistic attempts to prepare the ground for manoeuvring warfare by capitalising on the positioning class struggles within civil society. ⁴

A critical role in these processes was played by intellectuals. The significance of this group here is twofold: theoretically, Gramsci put them at the heart of political (class) struggles at the intersection between civil society and politics proper; empirically, they have played a decades-long key role in politics in Bulgaria (and Central and Eastern Europe generally) (see Bozoki, 1999; Eyal et al., 2000; Hristova, 2005, 2011). For Gramsci, it is the intellectuals’ function to help provide legitimacy for the hegemonic project of the day, and thus for the dominant social group advancing it. Intellectuals achieve this by organising the practical content of hegemony and manufacturing consent for it, in this way forging the dominant classes’ interests into what Gramsci called the ‘common sense’. As we shall see, the socio-symbolic power of intellectuals to formulate moral ends, to define the terms of the distribution of status and prestige, and to (de)legitimise political action transpired as particularly potent in Bulgaria during both the Winter and the Summer protests of 2013.

Protest Mobilisations of 2013

The protests of 2013 were probably the most wide-spread protest mobilisations in Bulgaria since 1990. The first wave in February started over abnormally high electricity bills. Protesters rallied behind slogans calling for the nationalisation of the foreign-owned energy companies, whom they blamed for the price hike, as well as behind slogans for an ‘end’ to poverty, unemployment and low pay. The mobilisation also called for the abolition of political representation and political parties, whom the protesters blamed for ‘betraying’ the interests of the people, and demanded radical changes to the political system in favour of a more direct form of democracy. Many declared that they no longer believed in political parties and desired to ‘take power into their own hands’. Slogans along these lines included ‘No To Parties and [No] To Monopolies’, ‘Down Go The Mafia. Power In Citizens’ [hands]’ and ‘End to the Illusions. Self-governance. Activeness Every Day’. Protesters also organised horizontally structured ‘citizen councils’ and initiated grassroots drafting of a new constitution which would reflect their demands for political system changes. The protest’s language was revolutionary, emotionally charged and often conspiracy-obsessed; grievances were also often articulated in nationalistic terms. In general, we can think of this protest as a radical democratic intervention by subaltern groups, who rejected political mediation (parties) and articulated a notion of civil society that overlaps with the notion of ‘the people’: a ‘people’s civil society’ (see Tsoneva and Medarov, 2014).

Interestingly, what many of the revolutionary manifestos which flooded the Bulgarian public sphere in February seemed to share was the demand to replace politicians (or political representatives) with citizens. Many of the placards which were raised in the streets also echoed this, for example: ‘It is the citizens’, not the parties’ protest’. Some of the most commonly reiterated phrases on the protest were ‘(anti)-corruption’, ‘(anti)-monopolies’, ‘civil society’, ‘transparency’ and ‘responsibility’. These are of course key liberal signifiers; yet they spearheaded demands for the nationalisation of energy companies and the abolition of representative democracy. Central liberal notions then textured a populist (in the sense of anti-elitist) discourse: one which dichotomises the social order into them (politicians/mafia/power-holders) versus us (‘the people’), but which at the same time articulates a conspicuously liberal – responsible, active, alert (who keeps political power in check) – civic subjectivity. In other words, articulating themselves as ‘citizens’ along with ‘the people’, and calling for ‘activeness’ and ‘responsibility’ every day, protesters attempted to re-stake a claim on the concept of ‘civil society’, taking it away from its post-1989 carriers – mostly non-governmental organisation (NGO) ‘experts’ (Tsoneva and Medarov, 2014) – and ‘back’ into the hands of the people, where it belongs.

Thus, the February protest’s combination of conspiracy narratives, revolutionary rhetoric and ‘citizen-patriot’ identities produced an internally contradicting and fragmented, often radically inclusionary (when they demanded direct democracy) but sometimes exclusionary (when they spoke in nationalistic terms) articulation of a new political subjectivity which attempted a counter-hegemonic intervention 23 years after ‘the end of history’. This new subaltern subject challenged the transition’s liberal consensus which had been attempted by an alliance of the political and intellectual elites of the ‘transition’. Both the economic pillars (i.e. liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation) and the political pillar (i.e. representative democracy) of the consensus were contested as part of a collective bottom-up political intervention for the first time.

The ‘populist’ protest of the subalterns of Winter 2013 then seemed to threaten to shake the dominant identity discourse of the transition – one that was linked to a capitalist narrative of future progress. Many of the intellectuals ⁵ who spent the last two decades procuring public consent for the liberal-capitalist consensus saw the protest as too irrational (anti-capitalist), too nationalistic and too conspiracy-obsessed, as well as dangerously ‘backward looking’ (including nostalgic of the socialist period). They dismissed it as a protest that ‘sought social privileges rather than rights’ (Genov, 2013) and thus as ‘populist’, ‘nostalgic of communism’ and ‘irrational’. They saw the February demands as ranging from the ‘unwise’ and ‘absurd’ to ‘the catastrophically harmful’ and ‘fantasmagoric’ (Bakalov, 2013; Stanchev, 2013). To these intellectuals, it seemed to pose a threat to the modernisation (Europeanisation) and de-communisation projects which underpinned the agenda of the ‘transition’ (and which seemed to boast much greater consolidating power during the 1990s).

The February protests resulted in the resignation of the centre-right government (GERB). Interim elections held in May produced an opposition-led coalition government composed of the Bulgarian Socialist Party ⁶ (BSP) – successors of the Bulgarian Communist Party (in government 1944–1990) – and the liberal Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF) – informally known as the party representing Bulgaria’s Turkish minority. Just a month into its mandate, the new government made an infamous decision to propose Delyan Peevski, a controversial figure widely suspected of corruption on an extraordinary scale, for the position of chief of the State Agency for National Security (DANS). This triggered a wide reaction of moral indignation, and once again, people took to the streets. Tens of thousands marched daily to protest against the controversial appointment and to challenge what many perceived as ‘coalescence between politicians and mafia’ in the country. Although the government was quick to repeal the infamous appointment within days, the protests persisted (although predominantly in the capital Sofia), demanding the immediate resignation of the new government which had now lost its credence in the eyes of many.

The Summer protest’s central demand – for resignation – was accompanied by calls for ‘morality in politics’, ‘authentic experts’ and ‘European normality’. It displayed clear pro–EU attitudes and imagined itself as ‘belonging to authentic civil society’. ⁷ It was also consistently anti-communist (directed at the BSP), since the ‘failures of the transition’ were attributed to ‘communist remainders’ in post-1989 politics. ⁸ The protest also insisted on staying peaceful and ‘positive’, and it generated an extraordinary amount of original and creative imagery. Many of the intellectuals of the ‘transition’, who were overtly critical of the Winter protests, now saw in the Summer protest liberal and pro-Western (EU) leanings and began to use the liberal media to emphasise what they saw as the latter’s ‘high culture’, eventually framing it as the protest of the moral, productive and creative, tax- (and bills-) paying, and even ‘beautiful’ middle class, which they pinned as the authentic carrier of the long coveted ‘civil society’ which would finally purge the ‘communist’ remainders and finish the ‘incomplete transition’ to European ‘normality’. The frame was quickly picked up by many of the protesters themselves. In forging this identity, some intellectuals, activists and media outlets conceitedly declared that this protest is different from the Winter one, claiming that it was the poor and desperate ‘mobs’ who protested in February, while now the ‘middle classes’ were marching not for material trivialities (such as bills), but for ‘values’ against the corrupt political elites. ⁹ What is more, they claimed that if the former were nostalgic of communism and prone to populism, the latter were rational enough to know that free market capitalism (and austerity politics) is the way forward. Despite the daily protests, the government stayed in power for a year and finally resigned in July 2014, putting an end to this second wave of street protests. New interim elections were then held in October 2014 which produced a government coalition between GERB, the Reform Block (the new formation mentioned earlier), the nationalist ‘Patriotic Front’, and the centre-left Alternative for Bulgarian Revival (ABV). ¹⁰

The elitist discourse of the Summer protest then can be seen as an attempt to re-assert the hegemonic position of the transition’s liberal consensus, which had been wearing away during the 2000s and which had been severely attacked by the February protest. Steered by the liberal intellectuals of the transition, discourses pertaining to both the negative and positive definitions of the consensus, that is, anti-communism and neoliberalism, respectively, were abundant in the language of the Summer protest, and appeared to attempt to gain whatever ground had been lost to what they saw as the ‘populists’ and ‘communists’ of February. Thus, the conflicting visions espoused in February and Summer 2013, which involved a host of contentions such as whether nationalising or liberalising the energy market constituted ‘good sense’ and whether direct or representative democracy is a better form of governance, clashed in a bid for hegemony over the ‘common sense’ of the whole of society (i.e. in a bid for hegemony). The ‘apple of contention’ which forged the specific divisions among protesters in 2013 was the right to represent civil society, which would ultimately grant one the right to impose a particular vision for social change, since a hegemonic position within civil society entails one’s vision for social transformation acquiring a hegemonic character.

These struggles, however, pushed political actors to attempt to adapt both to the increasingly contentious ideological environment and also the non-partisan identifications of protesters: both waves claimed that theirs was the citizens’/civil society’s protest and they did not let party symbols or flags crop up at the demonstrations. The disenchantment with traditional political party identifications is of course not a new phenomenon – augmented by the post-Cold War liberal-capitalist consensus, the traditional left-right divisions in Eastern Europe have been dissipating since the early 2000s when we witnessed the emergence of what Seán Hanley and Allan Sikk (2014) called anti-establishment parties. For many of these, as well as for any new-comers, however, it now seems necessary to appear to be ‘representing civil society’. Below I briefly review four of the newly emerged political parties in Bulgaria in the aftermath of the protests, all of which seemed to be attempting such a manoeuvre, that is, staking a claim to ‘civil society’.

Post-2013 Political Formations: Parties of the ‘People’s Civil Society’ and Parties of the ‘Middle Classes’ Civil Society’

A month after the February protests, some of the most active protesters who appeared most often in the media and who were widely perceived as the leaders (despite themselves rejecting the label) broke their pledge to never enter the political arena as a party and their movement, called ‘Movement for Civic Control’, participated in the interim parliamentary elections in May 2013 as part of a political party – ‘Democratic Civic Initiative’. ¹¹ With the motto ‘Civic Control – That is You’, it claimed to be ‘the mandatary of the protest’ (Fileva, 2013) and to represent the ‘awakened civic consciousness’ of the Bulgarian people. The selection procedure for the candidate members of parliament (MPs) reflected their pledge and is illustrative of their popular will subjectivity: candidate MPs were to be selected ‘straight from the street’; the latter were also to sign a ‘declaration for honest political behaviour’, ¹² a symbolic act which echoes the revolutionary, moral-nationalistic and highly charged rhetoric of the February protests. The party was short-lived as it failed to secure any seats in the elections, but the movement (‘Movement for Civic Control’) is still active, keeping the debate about corruption in the energy sector in Bulgaria and about the problems of representative democracy animated, albeit nowhere near as intensely and now mostly only on the internet.

Another new party – ‘Bulgaria without Censorship’ – also emerged after the February mobilisations. It was headed by a former TV-host Nikolay Barekov who began a generous campaign of promises such as to get unemployment down to 0% and to provide a tablet for every schoolchild (Mladenova, 2014). He also vowed ‘to work for capitalism and market economy with a human face’ and claimed to ‘desire reconciliation and unification for the Bulgarian nation’ (Mladenova, 2014), in this way skilfully combining liberal and nationalistic elements in a bid to reproduce the hybrid subject articulations of the Winter protesters (but also seemingly desiring to capture the pro-capitalist sentiments of some of the Summer protesters). He further pledged that ‘all politicians who have broken the law will lie in prison’ (Mladenova, 2014), vividly echoing the chants of the February protest crowd. He also pledged to fulfil this promise by carrying out an ‘Operation Clean Hands’ – the label used by some of the Summer protesters to refer to a demand to audit the income and property possessions of the Bulgarian political class at the time of the transition. In this way, Barekov clearly attempted to present his political project as representing civil society in all its articulations – both the ‘people’s civil society’ of the Winter and the elitist middle-class civil society of the Summer. At the same time, he was allegedly financially supported by major businesses and linked to controversial figures, including Delyan Peevski (the media mogul whose appointment triggered the Summer protests), which eventually dealt a blow to Barekov’s political project which is now collapsing. In the words of Vasil Garnizov (2014), a social anthropologist and protester in the Summer:

[Barekov’s] problem is that the discontented [of the February protests] do not recognise him [as their representative], and the active [Summer] protesters openly mock him as a face and a mask of the status quo (Vasil Garnizov, 2014).

Another new political party which emerged from the protests of 2013 was DEOS, which was registered in the Summer of 2014. The party describes itself as a ‘political subject which does not fit the standard [political] frames and terms. We lay the beginnings of a new type of politics, which banks on active civic participation and bottom-up initiative’ (DEOS, n.d.-a). Its stated priorities are the enforcement of law, sustainable development, and education (DEOS, n.d.-a); its stated mission is ‘to work actively to make Bulgaria a well-run state [where] the rule of law is [strong], in which we all develop [ourselves] freely in the conditions of democracy, pluralism, market economy and Euro-Atlantic orientation’ (DEOS, n.d.-b). As Jana Tsoneva and Georgi Medarov (2014) note, its structure, language and practices conspicuously borrow from the project management and entrepreneurial orders of discourse (Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999) of the NGO and business spheres: for example, the people behind the party insist on calling DEOS a ‘project’, rather than a party. Its ethos further disavows representation and explicit leadership and reflects a post-anarchist direct democratic principle (Tsoneva and Medarov, 2014). Its members also articulate a ‘productive and pro-active’ subjectivity, echoing the Summer protesters’ subject positioning as the disgruntled productive, tax- and bills-paying middle class. DEOS is still a small and somewhat marginal political formation, but it seems to be growing and gaining popularity among young liberal circles in Sofia.

At the height of the Summer protest, yet another new political formation emerged, calling itself The Reform Bloc and claiming to represent ‘the authentic’ civil society of the liberal, pro-EU middle class. It was set up as a coalition of five (previously existing) parties positioned to the right of the political spectrum. Apart from the parties in the Bloc, a body called ‘citizen council’ was also set up to include ‘citizens’ unaffiliated with the party. The Bloc also built a close working relationship with formal civil society organisations, particularly those supportive of and active in the Summer protest (such as ‘Protest Network’ ¹³ ). The rhetoric of the Bloc did not seem to reflect any of the concerns and language of the Winter protest. In contrast, it mirrored the ‘rational’, anti-communist, pro-EU and pro-morale concerns and rhetoric of the ‘frustrated middle class’ (to use Béla Greskovits (2007) and Ivan Krastev’s (2007) term) who marched in the Summer of 2013. A new coalition of already-established parties, the Reform Bloc, can be seen as highly illustrative of the tendency for political parties to (need to) re-articulate themselves in a new Gestalt to meet the exigency of the new ideological environment. The political parties which formed the Bloc are mostly the parties on the right of the political spectrum which survived in a separate form after the dissolution of the bi-polar political model of the 1990s, ¹⁴ and specifically the political fragments left after the disintegration of the United Democratic Forces (UDF), which was one of the two main political parties of the 1990s. The formation of the Bloc was celebrated by its supporters as the ‘(re-)unification of the right hand’. It is reasonable to argue that such a re-unification was effectively the response of the liberal-capitalist subjectivity under attack from the newly articulated popular-democratic wide coalition of political discontent (in February).

Since the early 2000s, the liberal-capitalist consensus has been challenged by parties widely perceived as populist (‘anti-establishment’) such as Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’s movement focused on anti-corruption (in government 2001–2005), Volen Siderov’s far-right ‘Ataka’, and Boiko Borisov’s GERB (in government 2009–2013). However, this is only true in terms of their rhetoric: despite their ‘populist’ promises, all of these parties persistently pushed (neo-)liberal policies, or as Krastev (2007) summarises, governments changed but their policies remained the same. With the challenge this time ‘from below’ in February 2013, however, the ‘right hand’ could no longer afford to be ‘divided’ into smaller parties – they felt that they had to reunite as a coherent political agent capable of withstanding the threat coming from what they regarded as mobs seduced by communism and populism, who articulated the hybrid political subjectivity of a ‘people’s civil society’ in February. What is more, this re-unification had to be articulated in terms that would allow the protesting ‘middle class’ of the Summer to recognise the new alliance as their political representative; hence the need to articulate ‘The Reform Bloc’ as not only yet another party to represent civil society but one that represents ‘authentic civil society’.

‘Positioning’ and ‘Manoeuvring’: Hegemonic Struggles at the Intersection Between Civil Society and Party Politics

The hegemonic struggles we have observed in Bulgaria in 2013 can be seen as reflecting changed socio-political divisions 20-plus years after the fall of the socialist regime. The 1990s slogan ‘civil society against the state’ has now given way to a different kind of struggle: one that no longer pits a homogeneous civil society against the state, but a struggle which seeks to re-constitute class-based political articulations within civil society, which are consequently utilised in a bid to take control of state power. To understand the struggles within such a conceptual framework would be to grasp the language and practices of both protest movements and political parties by matching their political tactics with the conditions in which they operate and the goals they pursue, that is, apprehending the specific type of political conjuncture in which they function.

These two protest waves need to be seen as part of the ‘organic crises’ set off in the former socialist states in 1989. Utilising another Gramscian concept, the Bulgarian ‘revolution’ of 1989 can be seen as a ‘passive revolution’ in that it was externally brought about (following Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika) and elite-engineered: there was at the time no attempt to drive popular support and change the worldview (the ‘common sense’) of the ‘masses’, that is, to establish political and cultural hegemony before the toppling of the regime. Instead, it was a revolution ‘from above’, to which the great majority simply acquiesced. The decade which followed involved intense attempts to establish such political and cultural hegemony of the transition’s liberal consensus, key to which were the ‘projects’ of de-communisation (or purging of the ‘burden’ of the totalitarian past) and modernisation (or catching up with the West on a course to a liberal democratic future). The (neo-)liberal ideas of privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation achieved a seemingly hegemonic character under the reform government of the UDF between 1997 and 2001. At the beginning of the 2000s, however, a multiplicity of competing discourses began to emerge. The previously hegemonic discourses of de-communisation, liberal democracy and free-market economy became increasingly fragmented and contested by the new discourses of populism, nationalism and, most recently, anti-austerity. It can be argued that during the 2000s, then, we witnessed the decline of a hegemonic discourse (which had temporarily functioned as a social imaginary, as a ‘horizon’ (Laclau, 1990: 63)) into a discourse once again struggling for hegemony: ‘a mythical space which strives to survive in the political arena’ (Celik, 2000: 201). This ideological fragmentation transpired gradually during the late 2000s and, augmented by the global economic crisis set off in 2007, culminated in the protest mobilisations of 2013.

In other words, following a gradual corrosion since the early 2000s and a severe challenge in the face of the 2007 global economic meltdown, the post-1989 liberal-capitalist imaginary (‘horizon’) received a bottom-up attack in the form of the two protest mobilisations of 2013. In the context of such a political conjuncture, the two protest waves and the formation of new political parties claiming to represent them point to two main inferences. The political mobilisations constituted a sort of war of position, whereby the struggle was waged over how a desired new social order – a new ‘consensus’ – would be constituted. Key to these ‘positioning’ struggles is the competition between different social groups’ divergent definitions of problems and proposals for solutions. At stake is a hegemonic status for the respective political project that would grant the social class advancing it the ability to launch a ‘war of manoeuvre’ against the state, that is, engage in a political struggle for state power. These ‘positioning’ struggles were fought on the terrain of civil society in a bottom-up manner: both civic movements preceded the formation of the political organisations which claimed to represent them. From this follows the second inference I draw: in the context of a liberal institutional arrangement more than two decades after 1989, civil society is no longer the homogeneous entity imagined shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the growing heterogeneity of post-socialist civil society, facilitated by the dissolution of the liberal consensus, the importance of political struggles in the arena of civil society has increased tremendously; that is, increasingly, struggles for hegemony in the region need to be played out first and foremost on the terrain of civil society before they can be transferred into the arena of formal politics. ¹⁵ In other words, gaining legitimacy vis-à-vis civil society by way of building an identity of ‘civil society representatives’ appears to have become critical for political projects striving for political leadership in the post-socialist region.

Conclusion

Overall, the turbulent events in Bulgaria in 2013 demonstrate a radically transformed political dynamic more than 20 years after the political transformation of 1989. The transition’s liberal consensus saw in February 2013 the most severe challenge to date in the country. Importantly, the challenge emerged in a bottom-up manner, as an outbreak of the insurrectionary energies of the disenchanted subaltern classes, that is, the oppressed and marginalised sections of society, who articulated a hybrid political subjectivity of a ‘people’s civil society’, imbricating the national-popular with the liberal. The liberal intellectuals of the ‘transition’ contemptuously dismissed them as February mobs seduced by communism and populism. To be able to withstand the threat coming from such counter-hegemonic subalterns, the same liberal intellectuals then rushed to seize upon the June wave of protests and attempted to channel the latter’s energies in an anti-communist and pro-neoliberal direction. This top-down ‘counter-counter-hegemonic’ intervention by intellectuals captured the political and economic imagination of Sofia’s aspiring middle class and carved out a class-based fissure within the civil society body. Amid these hegemonic struggles in the arena of civil society, several new political projects emerged, four of which I have discussed above. Two of these – Democratic Citizen’s Initiative and Bulgaria Without Censorship – attempted to capitalise mostly on the radical national-popular insurgency of February, whereas the other two – the DEOS project and the Reform Bloc – sought to represent specifically the voice of those who desired an ‘evolutionary reform’ (a completion) of the liberal transition, rather than its undoing. Significantly, the political ‘manoeuvring’ of these new political actors no longer takes place in isolation from what was long perceived as a ‘weak’ civil society in the region (Howarth, 2003). Instead, political manoeuvres in the region today seem to be increasingly pressed to draw their very legitimacy from civil society, which for its part seems ruptured with unprecedented positioning struggles over what will constitute the next ‘consensus’.