VARNA, Bulgaria — Early one morning this past winter, Plamen Goranov, a 36-year-old photographer, stood on the steps of City Hall in this once grand and now crumbling port city on the Black Sea and held up a sign demanding that the mayor and City Council resign. He then took a bottle of gasoline from his backpack, poured it over himself and set himself on fire. He died 11 days later in a hospital.

Since then, five other Bulgarians have died from self-immolation, one as recently as last week. All the others were apparently driven by economic despair. But Mr. Goranov’s death was perhaps the highest-profile political protest in countrywide demonstrations that forced the resignation of Prime Minister Boiko Borisov in February. As Bulgarians prepare to elect his replacement on Sunday, it has become a symbol of a despair of another kind — that nothing will change here.

“It’s changed how Bulgarians perceive their society as being in a social and moral crisis,” said Nadege Ragaru, a political scientist at the Center for International Studies and Research at Sciences Po in Paris. “Bulgaria is perceived as lost, desperate, unhappy and having no future. Before, people said, ‘Look, there is no future, everyone is emigrating.’ Now they say, ‘Look, they are so desperate, they self-immolate.' ”

Few in this city of 300,000 — where the protests in February were particularly furious — say they harbor any expectation that a new government will hear their complaints about corruption, rising prices, declining pensions and joblessness any more than the last. The only mystery seems to be whether the election will usher in a coalition that is merely unstable, or very unstable.