Bulgarians vote next Sunday in elections led by an ex-king promising salvation from grinding poverty 11 years after the collapse of communism -- but critics slam his pledges as populist and unrealistic.
The impoverished Balkan country's outgoing leaders claim former king Simeon II, who fled Bulgaria after World War II, no longer knows his homeland but is winning over desperate voters by offering impossible dreams.
But after four years of painful reforms by the outgoing centre-right government many voters are being swayed by those promises.
"The king has united the protest vote," said analyst Ivan Krastev.
"Before he arrived on the scene, the political system offered no form of alternative, just a battle between anti-communism and ex-communism which no longer provides sufficient motivation to vote."
The Simeon II National Movement (MNS II) was only founded in April, but opinion polls indicate it could well topple Prime Minister Ivan Kostov's ruling right-wing UDF coalition in the Sunday legislative ballots.
Some 38 percent of voters are planning to back his movement, against 17 percent for the UDF, and 16 percent for the ex-communist Socialists (PSB), according to the MBMD polling institute.
Kostov's United Democratic Forces (UDF) took power in 1997 after Bulgaria stagnated for the first half of the 1990s, and pledged to accelerate reforms needed to join the European Union. Sofia is still near the back of the EU queue, but at least began membership talks two years ago.
But Simeon's fledgling movement has transformed Bulgaria's political landscape, where power has been carved up for a decade between the UDF, embraced by the West for implementing sweeping reforms, and the PSB.
If he wins Simeon, who has spent most of his life as a businessman in Spain and who is related to Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, would be the first monarch from ex-communist Europe to return to the political stage.
He has fought on a package of pledges aimed at both the beggar and the businessman, a cocktail his opponents brand as totally unrealistic.
Having drummed up the core support among the 18 percent of Bulgarians who are unemployed, and the even larger numbers who live below the poverty line, Simeon has targetted the middle classes with pledges of increasing public sector wages.
And with some success.
"For more than ten years we saw the ex-communists and the anti-communists file in one after the other, but corruption and poverty are still with us," said Simeon Stoikov, a doctor who works in the capital Sofia.
"Why shouldn't we now take advantage of Simeon, with the contacts and know-how he has picked up in the west?" he demanded.
The coalition, nominally headed by a female politician and with a range of fresh-faced participants, also trumpets that it is bringing women into politics on the same terms as men, and the young alongside the seasoned.
But critics claim Simeon, who was nine when he last lived in Bulgaria, doesn't really know his homeland any more.
The country's president, Petar Stoyanov, a member of the UDF, has also issued veiled warnings over an MNS II triumph, telling Bulgarians not to be seduced by "pretty promises".
"When political illusions of today turn out to be without foundation tomorrow, we will all have to pay dearly for their collapse," he said in a recent address to the nation.
Meanwhile other foreign bodies like the World Bank have warned Bulgarians that financial support will be slashed if the pace of reform, including privatizations and continued austerity, slips under a new government.
Prime Minister Kostov, whose UDF coalition introduced a reform programme under the supervision of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after a social and economic crisis in 1997, has slammed Simeon's proposals.
He has insisted pledges to raise wages and pensions are "dangerous" because they could increase inflation, recalling the devastating rates the country saw in the mid-1990s. |
