DOUBLE CRISIS IN BULGARIA: TRANSFORMATION OF THE PARTY SYSTEM

The internal political turbulence that manifested itself in Bulgaria in the summer of 2020 did not end, as expected, after the elections in the spring of 2021. This suggests that the observed phenomena are not a consequence of political conjuncture, but are systemic in nature. The article hypothesises that the failure of the Bulgarian political elite to provide the country with stable governance for four years (2021–2024) is a consequence of the overlap of two long-term processes. The first one consists in the difficult adaptation of the national political culture to the model of parliamentary democracy established in the country after 1989. Symptomatic of these difficulties are the chronic fragmentation of the Bulgarian parliament, the polarisation of political discourse, the low level of trust in the institution of the National Assembly, and the decline in the electoral activity of the population. The second process involves the unfinished transformation of the party system. It started with a sharp decline in the popularity of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), one of the two leading political forces in the country, in the late 2010s and early 2020s. The drop in the importance of the BSP as one of the poles of Bulgarian politics caused a fierce competition among other opposition parties for the right to «replace» the Socialists as the leader of the protest movement. This circumstance further intensified the contradictions between the parliamentary factions and complicated the mission to form a stable ruling majority. In the final part of the article, the author considers possible scenarios for a way out of the situation, taking into account the analysed causes of political turbulence.