I wake up daily to politicians pleading for votes in Bulgaria’s European Parliament elections. The reason - my alarm is set on Bulgarian National Radio’s Horizont programme, which has a campaign advertising slot.

One advertisement has lodged in my head, but not for the best reasons. The Blue Coalition – which I privately dub the Black-and-Blue Coalition for the assault it has been under from without and within – has Nadezhda Mihailova telling us that 20 years ago, no one could have imagined that Bulgaria could become a free and democratic country, and yet it has, and 10 years ago, no one could have believed that Bulgaria would join the EU, and yet "we arrived" (I thought it was that the EU expanded to include Bulgaria, but that is nit-picking).

The trouble with the ad is that it is hardly what is known in the advertising game as a Unique Selling Point – a number of other parties that have been in government could make equivalent claims.

The standard of the campaigns is hardly scintillating. Television adverts, especially those by the Bulgarian Socialist Party-dominated Coalition for Bulgaria, tend to be a morphing succession of talking heads. The National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP) has a nice clip with a line-up of its people, against a background of the party’s yellow colour, clad in blue t-shirts with white letters that spell out, in Bulgarian, "Europe listens to us" ("with astonishment" I find myself adding).

Even though EU citizens meeting residence qualifications can vote in Bulgaria’s EP elections, their votes are hardly being pursued with much more vigour than those of Bulgarians.

The NMSP is among the few to have a functioning English-language version of its website, even though when I last looked it was six days behind the Bulgarian version.

To my surprise, I found that the big players – Boiko Borissov’s GERB, and the BSP, do not have English-language versions, even though the latter used to. The BSP has a nice selection of clickable video clips to watch, for those idle moments. Ultra-nationalist Ataka has an English-language version, remarkable considering that the party is seen as xenophobic, but this version was last updated in February.

Only one major site has three languages, that of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, with English (last updated in March) and Turkish (last updated in April).  The major constituent parties of the Blue Coalition – the Union of Democratic Forces and the Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria – both offer English-language options, but the first is blank and the second is blanker.

The MRF got into hot water in a previous election for allegedly conducting part of its campaign in Turkish, against Bulgarian law which specifies that election activities may be conducted only in the national official language. It is not clear if this is why most parties are not offering options in English or any other EU language (which add up to 21, subtracting English and Bulgarian) or if it simply too much effort to pursue votes from a small slice of foreigners.

So I am left reading the Bulgarian-language versions, which I can, and even though I cannot vote – I am not from an EU country – I do tend to think that anyone who cannot understand Bulgarian should not presume to be choosing this country’s representatives.