On October 3, Sofia mayor Boiko Borissov had breakfast with members of the Bulgarian Business Leaders Forum. Or perhaps he did not.
Borissov was late. The billed starting time, 9.30am, had passed by 10 minutes when Borissov strode into the Radisson Hotel’s Alexandra Ballroom, his bulk advancing assertively among the tables to the speaker’s podium as fast as the phalanx of camera people ahead of him would permit, and given that a large number of tables had been put out, symbolising the considerable interest inspired both by the man and the theme chosen for his speech, “Sofia and the business” (sic).
Borissov’s image always has been carefully crafted. In his days as chief secretary of the Interior Ministry, he favoured black leather, and fallow and full seasons of designer stubble and close-cropped hair. The man who so firmly had protested that he was not and never would be a politician (going on in 2005 to win a place in Parliament, which he spurned, before being elected mayor of Sofia) moulded for himself a man-of-the-people, let’s-get-down-to-work look, lately remodelled to suit his current civilian role - the black leather is back in the wardrobe, and Sofia’s first citizen now opts for business jackets over soft collars and t-shirts. Borissov, fresh from an early-morning meeting with the EBRD and the World Bank and bound for another important occasion, was not one to adapt to the conventions of Western business dress, notwithstanding his audience. In common, at least, with most of the male reporters but not with those seated at the catered tables, Borissov was in an open-necked shirt, two of three buttons undone, one collar not quite in place beneath a lapel. A man in a hurry, perhaps.
Borissov began, and so did the digital slide show. Somehow, as equipment was set up, the notion that we would get a power point presentation from Borissov seemed out of kilter with the things that macho men do. Not to worry, because the images that came up were well in keeping with what Action Boiko gets up to. Beautifully illuminated old buildings, previously left in the dark before the Borissov Era dawned on Sofia; immaculately re-paved streets, following depictions of their former shabby selves, before the General came along to get them in line.
For the audience, the start of Borissov’s presentation consisted of a disembodied voice emanating from behind a curved wall of the backs of hacks. Photographers and television camera people were adding a few more items to the considerable archive of one of the most-photographed men in modern Bulgarian history. After some minutes, he asked them to desist. “You meet me every day, it’s not a special event,” came the order, which not all obeyed. After all, suspicion lingered throughout the meeting that whatever Borissov’s protestations about the media paying him too much attention, he thrives on it. Hence the impression that, apart from his interplay with the audience during the question-and-answer session - during which he used the questions as a launching pad for his own priority subjects and soundbites, no matter what he had been asked - Borissov really was taking to the people out there via the TV cameras, and his audience was little more than a backdrop.
But he was not entirely oblivious to his audience. After brief introductions of some of the posse that he had brought with him, including a deputy mayor and the head of Sofia’s electricity company, Borissov went into sales person mode.
“Maybe some of you will help a bit more to beautify the city,” said Borissov, inviting people to follow the example of others in lighting up buildings, and doing other worthy things.
“I am looking forward to Christmas and New Year...to make Sofia look as beautiful as Vienna,” said the mayor.
Previous yuletides, of course, have seen several sponsored lighting displays in Sofia, some of them rather nice too, even the one that cannot be said to have much of a connection to the birth of the founding figure of Christianity, the giant soft-drink bottle, its globally familiar form picked out in red light bulbs.
Returning later on his speech to the same theme, Borissov said that such sponsorships were rewarded with opportunities for “discreet” advertising.
Should business contribute “your own projects, and your own money, of course”, said Borissov, this would help give its ordinary people the impression that Sofia was like any other European city.
He went on, to the theme of the need to be able to access and use EU funds effectively, of the need to do for more roads and lesser streets what had been done for the major boulevards, of the need to repair bridges. In this latter case, he was speaking literally. Bridges in the city, according to Borissov, had not been maintained properly for years. It seemed he wanted his warning recorded for posterity, lest the matter be taken seriously “only when a tragedy occurs”. Given that about four buildings in Sofia had fully or partly collapsed in recent days, including with loss of life, it seemed that we should be worried about the bridges too.
It was all a question of money. Borissov wanted more from central government, wanted taxation powers and rates adapted to give more power to local level and to take account of the relative wealth of areas, and, by the by, wanted the power - which his office currently lacks - to fire district mayors, in the way he had Sofia’s former chief architect (to those more accustomed to Western terminology, the equivalent of a town planner).
There were attempts to get him to specifics, like a question about plans for Sofia as a future tourist destination, including convention tourism.
It was an opening for Borissov to be rude about the National Palace of Culture, NDK. He recalled that he had had his mayoral election campaign headquarters there last October, his way had taken him past “only frogs - no fountain, no lake - just dirt and rubbish”. This led him to the anomaly that the building was under national Government control but the park was the responsibility of the municipality, which he found strange. He was especially acid about the 1983 sculpture/monument /monstrosity that is disintegrating in the grounds of NDK, making clear he would prefer the eyesore gone, rather than remain as a disgrace to Bulgaria and its capital city. (Somehow, this led to a mental image of a cartoon of Borissov as the Incredible Hulk, personally pummeling the ghastly thing to the ground.) All of these matters, and elsewhere, Borissov used to illustrate as evidence that the “model” on which Sofia and Bulgaria are governed were inappropriate and ineffective. He wanted to arrange for people to be able to build new, wonderful things in Vitosha Park but could not, because the park is under national jurisdiction. Only the road into it was municipal. Clearly, paving it would not be sufficient solace to Borissov. He wanted more.
“The country is organised in such a way you have no culture of responsibility,” he said. He returned to the subject of NDK. The shoddy coffee places in front of it had been leased out by the powers-that-were-before-Boiko for “10, 20, 30 years, for stotinki”. Builders were charged far too low fees for building permission, by the way, the current few stotinki for the right certificate should be raised to 50 leva.
A question about eased fees and a better system for enabling students to have access to public transport opened a highway to ramming central government for giving Sofia too little money. Especially, money was needed for new trolley buses (“the youngest is as old as I am,” said Borissov, who is in his 40s).
He did, however, confirm to a question from Nikolai Vassilev, State Administration Minister and a guest at the head table where Borissov did at no point take his seat or eat anything (so if anyone tells you that they “had breakfast with Boiko Borissov at the Radisson last week”, don’t believe them), that Sofia is to have skyscrapers. Two of them, in Zone B5 and Mladost. “We have planned a space for skyscrapers. This is a good thing,” said Borissov.
Borissov said that every day, there were three to four delegations in the mayor’s office from banks and companies from all over the world interested in coming to invest in the city and in Bulgaria. It was an interesting sound bite and a possible angle for a potential story to be written by any journalist who had filled up 18 leaves of a small pocket notebook, just to record whether Borissov would say anything of substance, beyond blame-shifting, breakfast time demagoguery, with a few handy soundbites for the cameras on various topics du jour.
