Six Bulgarians registered as candidates for the European Parliament turned out to have been collaborators of the former communist secret police and the former Bulgarian people’s army before 1990.

On April 25, the committee on the declassification of former communist secret police archives published its research and findings on the 145 candidate MEPs in the May 20 elections.

The committee was elected by Parliament on April 5 to open the archives of the former communist secret services and check all candidates for public posts for ties to these services.

Only one right-wing party’s name was on the list. The Union of Free Democrats (UFD), led by former Sofia mayor and current MP Stefan Sofianski, had cause to worry, because UFD candidate Georgi Belchev appeared on the list of collaborators. However, Belchev’s dossier had been destroyed. In the period 1990/91, a series of dossiers were destroyed on the orders of the then-interior minister General Atanas Semerdjiev who was among the leading figures in the former Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP). Today, all that remains to show that Belchev had an affiliation with the former communist regime is a piece of paper in the archive that notes that Belchev had a file. Minutes after the announcement of the list of six, it became clear that Belchev was no longer a canidate.

Belchev was “free” to decide his own political future, said Borislav Balgarinov of the Bulgarian People’s Union (the party is the UFD’s main partner in the elections). By the end of April 25, Belchev had not commented.

The other five alleged collaborators were Sevdalin Atanasov of the Green Party; Yunal Lyutfi of one of the minority parties in the ruling tripartite coalition, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF); and two candidates from the European Socialists Platform – Bulgarian Socialist party (BSP) and Movement for Social Humanism coalition, Evgeni Kirilov and Boyan Choukov. Last but not least was Krastyo Petkov of the list of the Citizens Union for New Europe. Petkov was a lifelong leader of one of the biggest labour unions, KNSB, and formerly was a BSP MP.

Hours after the list was published, the first comments emerged.

“I was in a secret navy unit in Sozopol for the period between 1986-1989,” Atanasov told Bulgaria’s Focus news agency. “Back than we had to work with classified information. Our unit guarded missiles and that is why our work was secret. It was what we did, absolutely normal,” Atanasov said. His background should not only not harm his campaign but should help because he had been serving his country, Atanasov said. “I was a conscript sailor and the committee should know that, I was not a collaborator,” he said.

He remained a candidate.

That Lyutfi’s name was on the list was not news for him or for the Bulgarian-language media. Lyutfi is currently Deputy Speaker of Parliament and as such he has been checked several times and has announced that he had a file in the former State Security archives. Lyutfi refused to comment, saying that the matter was “old news”. In 2001, the then ad-hoc committee on the opening of communist archives said that Lyutfi had one of the largest files (four volumes) in the archives of the communist services. He used the names “Mourad” and “Sider”. Lyutfi is last on the MRF list and, going by opinion polls, has no chance of being elected to the EP.

For the other three “collaborators”, the news is unlikely to harm their campaigns. It is a fact that the BSP is the successor to the BCP, which ruled Bulgaria from 1944 to 1989. More than half of the current prominent BSP members pursued at least part of their careers under communism as BCP members. This is the case with Kirilov and Choukov. Kirilov was born in 1945 and was a diplomat under communism, which at that time meant close ties with security services. Just like that of Belchev, Kirilov’s dossier was destroyed in 1990. However, in 2001 the ad-hoc committee said that Kirilov had been recruited by the communist secret service in 1978 when he was 33. He had the codename “Manchev”. Kirilov is fifth in the BSP election candidate list, which gives him a strong chance of being elected to the EP.

Choukov is also from the diplomats school. Born in 1952, Choukov was a diplomat in France and Spain. Currently, he is a professor at the Military Academy in Sofia. “I am proud of what I did for my country back then,” Choukov told Focus without actually saying what he did. “I worked for Bulgaria’s national security and feel no guilt about it,” Choukov said.

The last on the list, Petkov, had not commented by the end of April 25, but his position as the leader of KNSB for several years and his position from 2001 to 2005 as a BSP MP, left no doubt about his political affiliations. The 2001 committee identified Petkov as agent “Elenkov”.

The list of the six emerged four days after most parties officially started their election campaigns.

Chalga (pop folk) singers have prominent places in some campaigns.

The BSP has bet on Bulgaria’s biggest chalga stars for its campaign. On April 22, Azis, dubbed by Bulgaria’s media the king of chalga, opened the BSP’s campaign in the town of Smolyan, in the Rhodope Mountain. When everyone expected the customarily flamboyant performer to appear in short skirt, high heels and a blond wig, Azis turned out in an expensive suit and performed traditional Bulgarian folk songs, to the amazement of all.

The BSP booked another of Bulgaria’s most prominent chalga stars. Ivana is much appreciated among many Bulgarians for her simple lyrics, and the BSP seemed to find this appealing. Nikolina Chakardakova, a popular singer of traditional Bulgarian songs, is also on the BSP playlist, as well as pop singer Mariana Popova, who represented the country in the 2006 Eurovision song contest. The BSP also endorsed this year’s Bulgarian representatives in Eurovision.

The other parties were not that lavish. Speeches and singing the party song accompanied by screams of “Victory” was the usual scene. Only Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov’s party GERB attracted a crowd similar to that drawn by the BSP. It was somewhat of a surprise that Ivana performed her song We Are Number One in honour of Borissov. GERB said that Ivana performed the song for free as her way to wish success to Borissov and this had nothing to so with the rivalry with the BSP.