Strahil Deliyski

The paper aims to analyze the crisis of political representation in Bulgaria, using the conceptual apparatus of Antonio Gramsci’s “Prison Notebooks”. The logic of the argument is as follows: it begins by presenting the motivation and rationale for the usefulness of Gramscian analysis in understanding the crisis of political representation in Bulgaria. The next step, highlights Gramsci's under- standing of crisis and explores how it can be applied to the current situation. At the end, parallels are drawn between what Gramsci calls “morbid symptoms” and certain dynamics in the development of the Bulgarian political environment.

The article is positioned within the understanding of populism as a discursive practice and strategy characteristic of all political actors. Such an understanding turns the scope of the concept of populism from ideology or identity, i.e. noun (populist), which is thought and evaluated through the binary opposition populists - non-populists, into a characteristic, i.e. adjective (populist), which can be observed and measured on certain scales. The aim of the research is to apply such a framework regarding the political discourse in the days after the elections for the National Assembly from 4 April 2021.