PARENTS IN SOFIA, the Bulgarian capital, like to bring their kids to the Museum of Illusions, where they can take distorted photos of themselves in strange mirrors and stare at optical illusions until their eyes cross. As Bulgaria prepared for its fifth general election in two years on April 2nd, voters could be forgiven for thinking that their country’s politics were largely an illusion too. Take last year: while parliament was debating whether to authorise sending arms to Ukraine, Bulgaria’s leaders insisted that the country was not yet doing so. In fact, by November 3rd, when parliament approved the exports, its arms factories had already been shipping weapons to Ukraine for months.

Boyko Borisov (pictured), a burly conservative, dominated Bulgaria’s political life from 2009 to 2021. His GERB party is pro-Western in a country where Russia is widely admired. His tenure as prime minister ended in May 2021 amid massive demonstrations over allegations of corruption. Now the political landscape is shorn of big parties. Policy towards Ukraine and Russia remains contested. The share of Bulgarians who view Vladimir Putin favourably dropped from 70% before the invasion of Ukraine to 29% afterwards. But a poll in October found that 67% thought Bulgaria—a NATO member—should remain neutral, 16% that it should support Ukraine and 9% that it should support Russia.

Ruslan Stefanov of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, a think-tank in Sofia, says that about a quarter of the electorate support political parties “that nowadays call themselves patriotic but are essentially pro-Russian”. The other parties may dub themselves the “Euro-Atlantic coalition”. But they are divided over how, or even whether, to tackle high-level corruption.

The nationalist Revival party, one of the two main pro-Russian outfits, is now campaigning against Bulgarian adoption of the euro. The other, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), took part in a short-lived pro-Western government from December 2021 to June 2022. The leader of the BSP, who served as minister of industry in that government, publicly opposed sending weapons to Ukraine. But in her role as minister, she gave approval to arms companies to ship them to third countries from which they were sent to Ukraine.

Members of the same government helped broker an arrangement under which Lukoil, a Russian oil company with a strong presence in Bulgaria, continues to import and refine oil from Russia and then to export much of it for eventual use in Ukraine. (Officially the diesel is exported to companies in other countries, but they act as pass-throughs for Ukrainian buyers.) Russia gets export revenues from the oil, says a person involved in the deal. The arrangement is acceptable to the Russians, who calculate “that if they did not sell the oil to Ukraine, someone else would.”

Last June Bulgaria expelled 70 Russian diplomats. Some had allegedly attempted to bribe deputies from the BSP; yet the party’s leader reproached the prime minister for expelling them peremptorily. Christo Grozev, a journalist who works with Bellingcat, an open-source investigative group, told parliament in January that in 2016 Russia’s military-intelligence agency had conspired to overthrow Mr Borisov’s government. Many think the interference was hushed up because of Russia’s economic importance to Bulgaria. Asen Vasilev, a reformist politician who was minister of finance until last August, notes that much of the country’s graft is linked to Russia. “We thought we had two separate problems: corruption and Russia. But it turned out that it’s the same problem.”

In Bulgaria’s most recent election, in October, Mr Borisov’s party came first but was unable to form a government. The latest polls show the coalition of pro-Western parties that governed until last June running neck-and-neck with GERB. If they win, they may have to choose between an alliance with the Russophile BSP or one with Mr Borisov. In March 2022, when the reformists were in power, Mr Borisov was arrested in a graft probe but released without charges. He denied any wrongdoing. In February America slapped sanctions on Vladislav Goranov, Mr Borisov’s former finance minister, for corruption.

Much of Mr Borisov’s power lies in his party’s control over most big towns and cities. Hence the real fight for the future, says Mr Vasilev, hangs on the outcome of local elections in October. Indeed, if the general election next week is inconclusive, yet another will need to be held alongside the local ones. Bulgaria resembles Italy in the early 1990s, says Mr Vasilev, when a campaign to root out mafia influence was accompanied by a succession of short-lived governments. In Italy, though, an independent judiciary was able to attack corruption. In Bulgaria, says Mr Vasilev, where the judiciary has been “fully captured” by politicians, it is entirely up to the electorate to get rid of the rot.■