Protest parties and movement parties: comparing four protest cycles in Bulgaria

In contrast to the illiberal and authoritarian tendencies in other East-Central European countries, Bulgaria has experienced a reciprocal dynamic between electoral and protest politics, characterized by massive protest cycles with revolutionary demands every 7 to 10 years, that provoked political turmoil and instability, the resignation of governments and party system innovations. The latest anti-governmental protest cycle in 2020-2021 caused a new re-structuring, challenging the traditional political elite and the decade-long hegemony of the center-right GERB. Following the street protests, the country fell into a deep political crisis. A fourth successive parliamentary election over two years will be held this April as the new political forces failed to secure a stable majority. This is not new for the Balkan state as a similar trend of the rise of protest parties and movement parties in association with mass protest mobilizations has occurred in the past three decades. From the early stage of the transition, the protest mobilizations were as crucial as winning elections for the oppositional movement SDS (Union of Democratic Forces), which arose from independent associations to a broad historical block, consisting political parties, student movement and trade unions. Losing the first free elections, the opposition saw the protest arena as the terrain of a power struggle with the successor of the communist party, which culminated in the so-called “democratic revolution” in 1996-1997. In the 2000s, the great divide between “red” and “blue” camps blurred, opening opportunities for social movements to follow diverse trajectories. In the anti-establishment protest cycle (2009-2014), initially, movements distanced from traditional organizations and hierarchies, but soon began an institutionalization of protest groups and transformation into political forces (such as the Green movement and the liberal-right coalition Democratic Bulgaria). In the latest protest cycle, the interaction between movements and parties, and protest and elections provoked new polarization, expressed in the public debates as the division between the “protest” (parties, movements, and in general “civil society”) and the “status quo” (the traditional parties), To demonstrate the importance of protest politics in the political field, I trace historically the rise and fall of protest parties and movement parties since 1989 and focus especially on the movement-parties interactions during the four protest cycles. The comparative-historical analysis is based on secondary quantitative and qualitative literature.