🇧🇬 Bulgarian elections megathread (next up: European and National (?) Parliament 09 June 2024)

[Estrella]

I'm aware that Romania and Bulgaria have less in common than people often assume, which might make comparisions between them iffy, but it's kind of strange to see where the countries were politically in the Ceaușescu/Zhivkov days and where they are now. Contrary to what would have been expected, Romania now seems to have a healthier democracy than Bulgaria, with an actual anti-corruption party as a major player, a draconian National Anticorruption Directorate, stable-ish party system and so on.

Do you have any idea why?

[Estrella]

Is every political party in Bulgaria 'populist' as wikipedia describes?

Wikipedia infoboxes are varying degrees of useless in most of Eastern Europe, but yes, that's a correct description. Of course, if everyone is populist, no one is, and some populists are populister than others, so keep that in mind.

[Estrella]

Sorry for necromancing an old post...

The one exception was in 1997, but the country was in a humanitarian crisis and just back from the brink of civil war after the disastrous Videnov/BSP government

...but, um, how did Bulgaria even get to that point?

[Estrella]

New nominee is Plamen Nikolov - an ITN MP and EU/MENA regional manager for an American swimwear company, I'm sure we'll learn more about him in the coming few days. It's debatable whether or not the Klagenfurt Alpen-Adria Universitat is a prestigious university.

Edit: clarified Nikolov's biography a bit. It's almost comical how no journalists have any information on him, but at least they've scoured his LinkedIn profile and discovered an appearance of his in the archives of the ITN party TV channel

Judging by what Google suggests when I search for him, I think calling him "anonymous" would be an understatement.