Volen Siderov, whose ultra-nationalist party Ataka shook up Bulgaria’s political scene when it won 21 seats in Parliament in the 2005 elections and cast itself as the patriotic force that would vanquish the then-tripartite coalition, appears to be steadily shedding the role he sought as the country’s angry outsider.
 
An interview that he gave to Bulgarian-language mass-circulation daily Trud, published on October 15 2009, appears to confirm the trend.
 
Siderov, whose party returned to Parliament in the July 2009 elections with the same number of seats it initially had in 2005 – although with many changed faces because of internal party squabbles and scandals – pledged allegiance in the interview to Prime Minister Boiko Borissov’s ruling party GERB.
 
It was a clear change of message from the early days of Ataka’s stance on the national stage, hitting out in all directions, even in the past at Borissov, before the former Interior Ministry chief secretary and former mayor was officially confirmed by voters as Bulgaria’s political strongman.
 
However, it seemed from the interview that Siderov was hitching his star to Borissov’s wagon on the basis of the GERB leader’s proven capability to have seen the former tripartite coalition off over the political horizon.
 
The 2005 to 2009 governing coalition was made up of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and Simeon Saxe-Coburg’s National Movement for Stability and Progress (NMSP).
 
In July 2009, Bulgaria’s electorate gave most of their votes to Borissov, who formed a governing coalition made up solely of members of his own party.
 
The BSP was beaten into a poor second place and Sergei Stanishev’s hold on the leadership is in question from senior members who want him out.
 
The MRF returned with more or less the same votes, given the solid electorate that its leader Ahmed Dogan has built out of Bulgarians of ethnic Turkish descent.
 
The NMSP won no seats and Saxe-Coburg, the man who long ago had Borissov as a bodyguard and later was his boss when Borissov was Interior Ministry chief secretary, quit the leadership of the party.
 
Against this background, Siderov told Trud that Ataka’s strategic objective was to keep the BSP and MRF out of power, given that during their time in office, they had come to stand for corruption and bad governance. He wanted these two parties kept out of power for at least 10 years, Siderov said.
 
He rejected claims that Ataka was losing its identity in supporting GERB. Siderov said that he did not foresee Ataka merging with GERB, even in the long-term, but said that this did not prevent them sharing a common vision.
 
Just two days before the interview was published, Ataka had announced that it would not field its own candidate in the November 15 2009 Sofia mayoral elections, which are being held because Borissov vacated the post when he became Prime Minister.
 
Ataka, like Bulgaria’s centre-right Blue Coalition parties, has decided to endorse GERB’s candidate Yordanka Fandukova.
 
Siderov said at the time that the decision had been taken to bring together all right-wing forces to ensure that the BSP candidate, Georgi Kadiev, was "crushed" so that voting would go no further than one round.
 
This approach by Ataka is a far cry from its street actions in the past, from mounting vocal public protests while Borissov was mayor against loudspeakers being used to call the faithful to prayer at the mosque in central Sofia, to placing a caravan emblazoned with posters of Siderov outside the Cabinet office to urge the then-governing coalition to resign.
 
On July 29, in the hours after Borissov’s government was confirmed by Parliament, Siderov and a team from Ataka appeared to tow away the caravan, which had stood there for months, collecting the occasional signature against the Stanishev government, and being photographed by puzzled foreign tourists who could not miss it on the way to visit the Archeological Museum or photograph the Changing of the Guard outside the President’s office.
 
As with centre-right parties, there was speculation after the election that Ataka would be offered a role in government, but this went no further than it being offered the chance to sign a formal endorsement of the GERB administration – which Siderov declined to do.
 
Ataka, the party said on July 20, would go along with the position of Bulgaria’s voters who had wanted GERB to be the government and had wanted the BSP and MRF to pass into history.
 
The July 20 statement said that Ataka would support GERB in all that the new ruling party would do to revise the policies of the now-defunct government and to work against the economic crisis.

In October 2009, Ataka surfaced to complain about a plan to have an exhibition in Plovdiv by David Cerny, who offended many Bulgarians by symbolising the country through a "Turkish toilet", but given how many Bulgarians had complained, including in the political mainstream, the Cerny Affair was hardly Ataka's issue.
 
Of the Ataka of the streets, little is left by autumn 2009, beyond two elderly women who sit every day at a stall in a park in central Sofia, calling out to passersby to sign a petition against Bulgarian National Television having a once-daily bulletin in Turkish. This is a campaign that ultra-nationalists have been conducting for years, resentful at what they perceive as a legacy of Ottoman rule of Bulgaria, and rather like all ultra-nationalist campaigns, seemingly doomed to became faded and futile, rather like the yellowing pages of the petition book.