crisis

The reality of global risks is a condition to which humanity has adapted from the end of World War II to the present day. The state of total global war was replaced by the fear of a nuclear apocalypse. The great ideological and economic rivalry of the Cold War has been replaced by pervasive globalization, which, along with its pros, has come with many risks. The financial, economic, and humanitarian crises around the world are a clear evidence of this. Pandemics were left out of political analysis, even though the threat of a pandemic has been growingin recent years. This article analyses the changes that are taking place in the political system because of the pandemic threat. Political reaction is becoming the new reality, produced by a real risk to the population, which significantly affects its health status. This necessitates a more careful analysis of the emerging pandemic dystopia and the transformation of political reality.

The article is an attempt to conceptualize the escalating political crisis in the since 7th July 2020. This is the most significant domestic political crisis of a structural-functional type, after the landmark for the Bulgarian transition, crisis of 1996-1997. The research interest is also provoked by the fact that the current attempt for a radical political change is taking place in the context of the WHO-declared global pandemic of COVID-19. By itself, the pandemic could be categorized as a symbolic-propaganda crisis. On one hand, it is both an environment (domestic and international) for the manifestation of the political crisis, and on the other hand, it could be considered as a kind of “trigger”. This synchronous “superimposition” of crises of different order and nature necessitates a critical rethinking of the typological classification of domestic political crises developed by the author more than ten years ago. This is the main purpose of the article.

The crisis in 2020, as any crisis, brought many problems but also created opportunities in various areas of human life. In the field of politics, the crisis provided different opportunities for oppositional political actors in Bulgaria to be an alternative to the government, which is incapable of dealing with the biggest social problems, multiplied by the crisis. Chances, however, must be “caught”. If the opposition is not able to make the right decisions in the context of contemporary events, it will lose that political game undoubtedly. Even if, the opposition has all the necessary qualities and the necessary circumstances are there, the essence is contained in the right and prompt decisions.