Voters in Bulgaria go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new parliament after a turbulent period that has seen three governments fall by the wayside since early 2013 when a wave of protest engulfed the country.

Bulgarians have lived in an almost permanent state of crisis since the demise of the socialist regime in 1989. Twenty-five years of “democracy” has been characterised by endemic corruption and rampant organised crime, eroding confidence in the economy, encouraging mass emigration and delaying Bulgaria’s participation in the EU’s Schengen Agreement, which allows passport-free travel between countries.

This is a world in which powerful oligarchic networks have succeeded in “capturing the state”. At one and the same time they dominate Bulgaria’s political parties and ruthlessly pursue their own interests, remaining hidden from any kind of public scrutiny, much less accountability or justice.

Formal democratic institutions have continued to function since 1989 but in a context where the real power is wielded by informal oligarchies, most with strong links to organised crime.

This problem is so acute that it is impossible to know just where organised crime ends and the state begins. The nexus between the two is characterised by deliberately complex bureaucratic structures, opaque corporate accounting, preferred-bidder public-procurement frameworks and a maze of offshore accounts which support vast money-laundering activity by oligarchies and their political supplicants.

In many industries it is almost impossible to identify the beneficial interests that constitute the real controlling forces and dominant players. The Bulgarian “revolution” that ended communist rule was more akin to an internal coup d’etat: the party went through the motions of renouncing communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the reforms were cosmetic. The greater part of the party’s grey nomenklatura mutated into fixers and middlemen whose inside knowledge of the system gave them significant advantages in the new world of democratic capitalism and competitive party politics.

Citizens and mafia

At the same time, deregulation, privatisation and monopoly practices have enriched the elect and utterly eroded the social contract. Corruption and the abuse of power have become so entrenched that Bulgarians profess significantly less trust in their politicians and political institutions than any other European citizenry.

This unholy alliance between rapacious capitalism and unscrupulous oligarchy has helped to sustain and reproduce patterns of nepotism and theft of public resources amongst the elite, while condemning the majority of Bulgarians to a precarious existence characterised by low and stagnant wages and ever-increasing prices.

The shadow cast by severe economic hardship and chronic poverty is truly existential, especially in rural areas. Since 1989, Bulgaria’s population has declined from nine million to 7.3 million, due to sustained emigration and a falling birth rate. EU figures demonstrate that Bulgarians have the lowest standard of living in the union, at around 50 per cent of the EU average.

Bulgaria has received nearly €10 billion in EU funding since joining, but the power to distribute significant spoils has been ruthlessly manipulated by a range of political actors. Some commentators argue that virtually the entire Bulgarian political class is privately complicit in the embezzlement of the European funds.

Rather than structural and cohesion funds being spent according to rational and efficiency-enhancing universal criteria, Bulgarian politicians have openly boasted of their capacity to divert resources to their own supporters in arbitrary fashion.

Gerb to be largest party

Elected in 2009 on a strong anti-corruption platform, with a focus on tackling organised crime, Borisov owed his victory largely to his reputation as a tough police chief who had stated his determination to crack down on oligarchs and corruption. Once in office, however, Gerb took political cronyism to new levels and became more and more unpopular as it implemented austerity policies that cut deep into Bulgarian incomes and living standards.

Borisov was further discredited by revelations of large-scale illegal wiretapping of political opponents by his interior minister. Then, on the day of the last general election, hundreds of thousands of illegal ballots were found at a property belonging to a prominent Gerb supporter, suggesting a clear effort to influence the course of a tight electoral contest.

Borisov transcripts

That Borisov could once again be in a position to form a government is due to both the incompetence and the even more egregious corruption cases that engulfed the coalition government which succeeded his in 2013, formed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the successor to the former communist party. That administration was led by Plamen Oresharski, a non-partisan former finance minister. Within a short period, his critics were deriding him as “Oligarski” and calling on him to resign, which he finally did in July after many months of scandal and almost permanent street protests.

Most Bulgarians are deeply cynical about the capacity and willingness of the political class to tackle the country’s deepseated problems. A banking crisis rooted in the failure of a shady bank, directly linked to agencies of the state and major oligarchs, has reminded Bulgarians of the deep penetration of the state by an unrestrained cohort of powerful semi-criminal economic interests.

All of this has contributed to a widespread view of this election as one that entirely revolves around a redistribution of the spoils of office and the maintenance of a “façade democracy”. John O’Brennan lectures in European Politics and Societies and is a director of European Studies at Maynooth University