In case you’ve wondered why the small road right in front of the Presidency has been closed by police recently and why loud music is played in the area every couple of hours, wonder no more. It is the the daily fete of the ultra-nationalist party Ataka.
When the Government survived its sixth vote of no confidence in July, Ataka leader Volen Siderov said that Ataka would stage protests until the Government fell. And, to make things official, Siderov chose the square between the Presidency and Archaeological Museum, a few metres from the Cabinet building.
What better place is there for a protest against the Government than the square of power, he must have thought.
Now, a month later, it is good to see what Ataka’s ongoing protest has achieved.
First, Ataka managed to get on the nerves of motorists because police closed the street in front of the Presidency to traffic, forcing motorists to take annoying detours.
Second, the party managed to vex the people working in the area and the honorary guards standing in front of the Presidency by blasting 19th-century Bulgarian revolutionary songs from their speakers. After Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev acted as a DJ at his Bulgarian Socialist Party annual gathering some time ago, Siderov obviously decided to use the same means and chase Stanishev out of office with music.
After all, art knows no boundaries.
Unfortunately for Ataka, the walls of the Cabinet building (1950s Soviet design) are thick and this has so far failed to produce the results that Ataka wants. What the siege has achieved is Stanishev having locked the doors to his building. This happened a few days ago when the Cabinet held its weekly session.
Fearing that Siderov would rush into the building, as he did when Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited Bulgaria two months ago, Stanishev had all the doors locked. This was an unpleasant surprise for the media, who had to find another way to enter the building and do their job.
So once again, the Ataka protest managed to interfere with normal life by blocking media entrance to an official event.
As for Ataka’s musical terror, one can only wonder why the party did not play Siderov’s favourite composer Wagner, as they usually do at Ataka rallies. Probably because they thought that Bulgarians would respond better to 19th-century Bulgarian revolutionary tunes written by Bulgarian revolutionaries in the era when Bulgaria was under Ottoman rule, because these songs have emotional currency with all Bulgarians.
It was interesting to see how city hall reacted to Ataka’s wish to block one of the central areas of the city for an indefinite period of time. According to the law, the mayor must authorise all public protests in his city. In this case, Siderov did not have to wait long.
Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov has long proclaimed himself the main opposition to the Government, and he saw no reason not to allow Ataka’s protest. After all, the protest serves a purpose shared by both Borissov and Siderov.
History recalls another case, when a group of people decided to stage an ongoing protest against a public institution. Several years ago, the then-Sofia mayor Stefan Sofiyanski gave permission to a group of Christian Orthodox priests to protest against the head of Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Maxim. It was a politically driven decision because Sofiyanski’s party at the time favoured the priests, and not Maxim with his communist past.
Like Ataka today, the priests put up a tent and said that the protests would continue until Patriarch Maxim left the post. Ironically, the priests’ tent was set up several metres from where Ataka has its tents today. Now, several years later, Patriarch Maxim is still in his post and the priests’ tent is still in its position, right across from Bulgarian National Bank and the National Art Gallery.
