The other civil society: digital media and grassroots illiberalism in Bulgaria Open Access

In the past 10 years, observers have noted a ‘drift sharply away from liberal democracy’ (Csillag and Szelényi 2015, 18) or ‘a democratic backsliding’ (Cianetti et al. 2018) occurring in some European post-communist societies. ‘Illiberal democracy’ (Zakaria 1997) seems to be on the rise in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Proudly proclaimed as the political model best fitting his country by Hungary's Viktor Orban in 2014, its various national manifestations have been popping up across the region, especially in the context of CEE governments’ response to the Syrian refugee crisis. In some countries, like Poland and Hungary, this trend has taken an overt political form with governments openly embracing illiberal ideology, with Trump-style attacks against ‘political correctness’ and the ‘liberal media’ coming from the top, and with the moral and political legitimation of militant nationalist sentiments and organizations (Zakaria 2014, Metykova 2020). When developments like that erupt at the level of national political institutions, the biographies of leaders and the trajectories of political parties are examined in search for the underlying factors, the turning points and the external influences (e.g. Buzogány 2017). Yet, there is also a growing interest in ‘shifting the perspective away from a narrow focus on elections, less educated electorates, leaders’ charisma, and anti-elite demagoguery’ (Greskowitz 2020, 249) and in looking beyond developments in the electoral arena (Pirro and Róna 2019). Greskowitz (2020) has argued that those trying to explain the robust support Orban's Fidesz-MPSZ party enjoys among Hungarian voters should take seriously extra-parliamentary mobilisations. His analysis demonstrates that before Fidesz-MPSZ landslide victory in the 2010 election, there had been a ‘right-wing conquest of civil society’ (249) in Hungary. Following this lead, the research presented here focuses on the sources of the illiberal turn lying beyond parliamentary politcs in an East European post-communist country where the drift away from liberal democracy is still not openly manifested at the level of the state and public institutions. Borisov's government in Bulgaria (in 2020), unlike its Polish and Hungarian counterparts, still formally toed the line drawn by the European Union in terms of official policies and proclaimed values. At the same time, extra-parliamentary undercurrents that occur at the level of the civic grassroots and in the sphere of civil society show clear signs of a cultural and ideological backslide away from liberalism. These forces have propelled the rise of ‘patriotic’ political parties that vie for parliamentary representation and, in fact, held the balance of power as partners in the Bulgarian governing coalition (2017–2021). The Bulgarian case is therefore interesting as it offers researchers the opportunity to analyze the process of illiberal encroachment on civil society and eventually on state institutions in the making.

In his study of the strategies and tactics of the conservative Civic Circles Movement that, in his view, built the social and cultural foundation of Orban's Fidesz-MPSZ electoral success in 2010, Greskovits describes a flurry of activity by right-wing activists over the span of several years that included community, cultural and religious events, celebrations and discussions in the process of which participants consolidated their collective identity and ideology and accumulated experience in mobilization. A central hub coordinating and documenting these activities (and also the data source for Greskovits’ analysis) was the Electronic Newsletter of Civic Circles. In later years, a new generation of digital media has added new possibilities to civil society activists’ communication repertoire. While much has been said about the use of social media by progressive social movements (Tufekci 2017, Gerbaudo 2012), less attention has been paid to the role of these platforms in conservative and illiberal organizing. Yet writing on the social makeup and organizational networks of the Tea Party in the USA, Williamson, Skocpol and Coggin (2011) observe:

The goal of the small-scale exploratory study to be presented in this article, therefore, will be to examine the grassroots processes unfolding within Bulgarian civil society that contribute to the strengthening of the social base and cultural influence of illiberal values and, under certain circumstances, could lead to further political backslide away from liberal democracy. The study focuses on examples of illiberal-leaning activism identified in Bulgaria with the questions: What rhetorical strategies do its proponents use in formulating their grievances and demands? How do they position themselves as representatives of the civic grassroots? In what ways do they employ digital media in the pursuit of their goals, and is the digital media environment conducive to their proliferation and influence?

Although the concepts of civil society and ‘the grassroots’ are most commonly applied to denote the broad participation of citizens in the democratic process that strengthens liberal democracy (Cohen and Arato 1992), neither of these concepts is unambiguous or unproblematic. The differences, divisions and tensions within civil societies, especially those in Central and Eastern Europe, are addressed and problematized most explicitly by Kopecký and Mudde (2003) through the conceptual distinction between civil and ‘uncivil’ society. The ethical and ideological values espoused by citizen associations, Kopecký (2003) observes, are a defining criterion when their place in (or out of) civil society is determined by many scholars writing on the subject. Typically, only groups that ‘support and embrace liberal democratic values and institutions’ (p. 11) are counted in. Such a selectivity is in line with the understanding of civil society as being defined by a particular type of ethics (Rucht 2011). According to Rucht, abiding by the principles of ‘tolerance and, above all, recognition of the other’ (p. 399) is what qualifies collective actors for inclusion in civil society.

In a somewhat provocative analysis, Mudde (2003, 155) argues that when scholars discuss concrete examples of civic groups and social movements, the decision to exclude certain organizations from the sphere of civil society often turns out to be insufficiently grounded in academic and empirical arguments, but is rather a matter of normative and personal preferences. Nationalist movements, he shows, have been successively characterized as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and respectively in or out of the ‘real civil society’ depending on the ruling regimes they have supported or opposed in various periods and historical contexts. Thus, the boundary between ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ organizations and movements remains ‘unclear and theoretically problematic’ (p. 155). Mudde (2003, 159) goes a step further to argue, in resonance with the NGO-ization thesis (Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013), that in post-communist Eastern Europe, what is understood as civil society proper are elite – and external sponsor-driven NGOs ‘detached from society’, whereas ‘many “uncivil” organisations are true social movements, i.e. involved in grass-roots supported contentious politics.

Since the publication of Kopecký and Mudde's book in 2003, a new terminology has become pertinent in thinking about the nature of such actors. American political analyst Fareed Zakaria first coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’ in 1997. This notion gained new life, specifically in the context of Eastern European politics, when Hungarian prime minister Victor Orban declared that the aim of his government was the construction of ‘a new state built on illiberal and national foundations’ (Orban 2014). Orban's political course has become a matter of much discussion and criticism (Metykova 2020, Kornai 2015, Herman 2016) and a hot issue on the European political scene due to its overturning of basic tenets of liberalism and replacing them with flagrant ‘nationalism, religion, social conservatism, state capitalism and government domination of the media … ’ (Zakaria 2014). These developments, along with the rising tide of populist politics worldwide most prominently exemplified by the election of Donald Trump and the UK's Brexit in 2016, have led us to see the exploits of ‘uncivil’ groups in a new light. For Eastern European democracies, a pivotal moment that saw a frenzy of activity by illiberal groups was the Syrian refugee crisis on 2015–2016. What might fall under Mudde's (2003, 155) qualification of ‘true social movements’ mobilized across the region to deny refugees access to their respective countries.

The positions represented by Kopiecky and Mudde (2003) on the one hand, and by Rucht (2011), on the other, create a conceptual conundrum. It does look theoretically inconsistent to deny a place in civil society to civic self-organization that unfolds outside of the spheres of the market and the state but embraces illiberal or uncivil values and ideologies. At the same time, to talk about ‘illiberal civil society’ given that civil society is a fundamental liberal construct sounds like an oxymoron. Our chosen way out of the impasse is to adopt a Gramscian outlook on civil society as a turbulent sphere in which cultural and ideological contradictions abound and different ideas fight for moral and intellectual leadership. Notably, Gramsci (1999) did not draw a firm distinction between civil and political society, but rather considered them closely intertwined. His writings ‘aim to expose how domination of political society and leadership of civil society actually reinforce each other’ (Buttigieg 1995: 27). He saw civil society as a war zone in which a struggle for hegemony takes place. He emphasized the significance of the material sites in civil society, the ‘formidable complex of trenches and fortifications’ (Gramsci quoted in Buttigieg 1995: 26) where different ideologies dig themselves in and mobilize for resistance or attack. This ‘powerful system of fortresses and earthworks' (Gramsci 1999: 494) could support an extended ‘war of position’ between conflicting political and cultural fractions and ideas. He wrote about these sites with ‘material particularity,’ placing on top of the list the press, the publishing industry and ‘every form of publication, including the most humble’ (Buttigieg 1995: 26): ‘publishing houses … , political newspapers, reviews of every kind, scientific, literary, philological, popular, etc., various periodicals including even parish bulletins’ (Gramsci, quoted in Buttigieg 1995: 26). These are the elements of the material apparatus through which hegemony is established and maintained, along with institutions like libraries, schools, associations and clubs, the Catholic Church, architecture, the layout of streets and their names. It is only logical to suggest that nowadays digital media take a prominent place within this material apparatus and introduce new and arguably more tumultuous dynamics in the clash between the ruling hegemony and counterhegemonies (plural form intended) that vie to dethrone it and take its place.

The most recent upsurge of illiberal doctrines in the political sphere of East European countries formally constituted as liberal democracies, therefore, gives us a strong incentive to examine how these ideas emerge and pursue influence in civil society; where they fortify themselves; and whether digital media are implicated in the process.

The research on which the following analysis is based includes two qualitative case studies conducted in the course of a larger project investigating the ways civil society organizations in Bulgaria take up and employ digital media in their public advocacy. The case studies are focused on two organizations that, in different ways and degrees, espoused illiberal ideologies and sought public following and support for them through a diverse repertoire of activities between 2016 and 2017. These two organizations were Shipka Bulgarian National Movement (Shipka BNM) and the Vazrazhdane (Revival) Political Party – started out as a civic movement but soon reconstituted into a political party (2017). The two organizations’ interventions in public debates were characterized by first, their use of nationalist rhetoric and secondly, by the fact that they fervently opposed the acceptance of Syrian refugees into Bulgaria in the context of the unfolding Syrian refugee crisis in the period 2015–2017. Both organizations remained outside or relatively marginal to institutional politics but nevertheless were vocal on political issues and enjoyed some degree of public visibility. Shipka BNM grabbed news headlines with its paramilitary activities targeting migrants who attempted to cross the Bulgarian border illegally in 2016. Revival took part in the parliamentary elections in 2017 and won 1.11 percent of the popular vote, a share insufficient for entering parliament and yet significant enough to qualify it for public subsidies.

The methods used in the case studies centered on the two organizations comprised in-depth qualitative interviews with leaders and members who agreed to share their views. An examination of the web sites, Facebook pages and programmatic documents of the organizations was also performed with a view to determining their formally stated values and goals and their communication strategies.

It should be noted that recruitment and interaction with interviewees representing these organizations posed some challenges. Firstly, it was difficult for us as researchers who did not share the worldview, premises and hence the vocabulary of illiberal groups to formulate our questions in a language neutral enough not to raise suspicion and resistance. In some cases, we were compelled to put aside our interview guide and let the respondents produce an account of the goals and activities of their organization, choosing their own focal points and terms.

The second challenge stemmed from the fact that the two organizations we approached, as it turned out, were of the leader-centered type. This meant that few people outside the small leadership circle were encouraged or chose to be interviewed. Thus, we conducted a group interview with the leader of the Revival party, his deputy and their media campaign manager and sat in an extended press conference given by them. An additional candid interview with one of the administrators of the party's Facebook group and web site was performed via Skype. We managed to secure only one three-hour-long interview with the spokesperson of the Shipka BNM that took place in two parts over Skype. Our requests to be introduced to other members of the organization with a view to further interviewing were indirectly turned down.

The empirical material collected in this way – interview transcripts, screenshots and internet posts and website content – was subjected to thematic analysis aiming to identify the collective action frames (Benford and Snow 2000) constructed by the three groups: the main grievances and social problems articulated by them; their proposed solutions; the key features of the collective identities they constituted and their views and practices concerning digital media as tools for organizing and advocacy. In the rest of this article, we introduce the two organizations and discuss the specific inflection of their nationalist rhetoric and digital media use. In the concluding analysis, we sketch what we see as the main driving forces and facilitating conditions of illiberal grassroots activism in Bulgaria.

The extra-parliamentary Revival Political Party stands out with its pushy use of national-patriotic symbols in all its public communication – from the name of the party itself to the choice of historical dates in the scheduling of its formative meetings and events. Revival founders define themselves implicitly as representatives of a burgeoning middle class – ‘young, educated, creative’ with successful professional realization and with established families and children. As much as they project an image of people who have achieved a respectable social status, however, they are deeply critical of the country's transition from state-run to market economy and of its opening to global markets and integration into the European political community. Revival criticizes official foreign policy for its alleged betraying of national strategic interests, subservience to external powers and questionable alliances (presumably, Bulgaria's membership in the European Union and NATO are examples of such alliances). They condemn the economic policies implemented by all Bulgarian governments from the fall of state socialism in 1989 through the ‘destructive transition’ to market economy and to this day for creating deep social inequalities and only benefiting a corrupt political class leaving ordinary Bulgarians impoverished, humiliated and demoralized. Revival characterizes the contemporary Bulgarian elites as an ‘oligarchic establishment of a comprador type’ (Vazrazhdane 2017) and promises to prosecute them for their corruption. It calls for a reverse lustration that would seek to identify and punish those responsible for the plundering of the national economic assets in the course of the post-totalitarian transition.

Its sharpest critical barbs Revival reserves for the state's cultural policies marked by what they see as extreme liberalism, globalism and political correctness. In their view, the hegemonic narrative imposed by the state and instilled in educational programs by the Ministry of Education subjects Bulgarians to ‘ethnocide.’ Young people's sense of national identity is obliterated; they are being prepared to inhabit a global world in which ethnic origins do not matter. In this way, official history textbooks cultivate ‘nihilists, degenerates and emigrants’ (Portal 12, 2016). Revival's single-minded efforts are focused on counteracting these cultural policies. Many of the public initiatives organized by the party's activists aim to restore national monuments and to offer educational materials and events featuring their understanding of the ‘true’ national history. They seek to highlight the greatness of the Bulgarian people and the unique contributions Bulgarians have made to human civilization. These contributions, the party's leader and author of an alternative primary school textbook contends, are currently being diminished by the Bulgarian educational system. Thus, Revival positions itself as a defender of Bulgarian national identity and pride in direct confrontation with the state-sanctioned cultural hegemony.

All in all, Revival's view on the current state of Bulgarian society can be characterized with a phrase taken from Donald Trump's vocabulary – as a national carnage. Nowhere is this carnage more dire, according to them, as in the demographic collapse experienced by the Bulgarian nation. If things continue down this path, Revival warns, Bulgarians will soon become a minority in their own country. In the commonsense of a Revival adherent, this is a tragic destiny because minorities are seen as problematic and even dangerous, especially when they reach for social welfare as in the case of the Roma population. On the other hand, Revival is a champion of Bulgarian minorities abroad, including immigrant communities, and extends its patriotic educational initiatives to them.

The solutions that Revival offers for fixing the dire straits in which Bulgaria finds itself, explicitly formulated in its 2017 election platform, revolve around restoration of a mixed pallet of ‘traditional’ values and government principles that include borrowings from deep-seated national mythology as well as from the idealized memories of the socialist period – of Bulgarian national dignity and self-confidence ‘to the level of its greatest times’, of a strong social welfare system, healthcare, education, fair pensions for the elderly, an independent international policy and most importantly, a demographic boom. They believe the Bulgarian family defined as a ‘unique bond between one man and one woman, the place where children are born, raised and educated’ has to be supported by the state by all possible means.¹ Revival refuses to be defined as a left or right political party. They insist on a bundle of principles that bring together individual initiative and independence from the state (no one should expect the state to give them food, money or a job) with the social responsibility to protect children, the disabled and the vulnerable. The party assigns a substantive role to the state in ensuring the stability of the national economy, especially in sectors of strategic importance. At the same time, it rejects both ‘market fundamentalism’ and total state control over the economy.

As a small party not represented in parliament, Revival is perched on the fuzzy border between civil and political society with aspirations for entry into the institutional political sphere. This position is chosen strategically by its founders because they want to selectively combine traits of the image, reach and action repertoire of both civic and political organizational forms. The word ‘party’, one representative tells us, has a negative meaning in the mind of Bulgarians and that is why calling themselves the Revival Movement, or simply Revival, is preferred. At the same time, as their leader Kostadinov explains, during the short period they functioned as a ‘social movement’, he and his co-organizers realized that:

This realization notwithstanding and failing to gain entrance to the halls of state power, Revival resorts to these channels for propagation of counterhegemonic ideas across civil society. Facebook, in particular, has been their medium of choice due to the relatively low cost of participation. Another reason lies in the circumstance that Revival is driven by and appeals to young professionals approaching middle age, a generation already steeped in social media use. Thus, the proposal and call for the creation of the party that led to its inaugural congress was distributed exclusively through personal connections and shared Facebook posts. Party activists rely on digital platforms for their internal communication. The regular exchanges between the different local nodes of the Revival network and its members and supporters take place by means of a layered assemblage of electronic forums, public and private Facebook groups and web pages. These different channels are used for purposes spanning confidential internal discussions, public communication with supporters and campaigning. Our conversation with one of the administrators of the party's web site and Facebook page reveals an orderly, well thought-out arrangement of access privileges and clear chain of decision-making with regard to posting and moderation.

Revival's leader, Kostadinov sees Facebook as the only route for getting out of the mainstream media blackout, or as he calls it ‘umbrella’ that he believes is spread over his movement with the aim to reduce their visibility:

In light of this, the Revival leadership has carefully worked out a strategy for circulating their ideas as widely as possible through content tailored for the social media environment. In their own account, they have focused on the release of ‘new, short propaganda materials’ such as a slogan accompanied by a good picture every day. According to this plan, every day, a new message appears on their page telling people basically the same thing in different words – that ‘Bulgaria is going away’ and ‘we are the only ones that can save her’. This approach, they believe, has led to a growing interest in their organization.

Revival leaders pay close attention to these numbers. They carefully calculate and reflect on their readers’ responses and try to propel their likes and shares. If, they say, 11 activists spend one hour in a day producing posts, the activity on the page grows exponentially. Another big hike comes from dozens of external Facebook pages that have embraced Revival's causes and share all their publications. So, in order to stay relevant and publicly recognized, Revival's leaders make concerted efforts to be continuously active online and to keep the numbers of their shares and ‘likes’ as high as possible. This goes along with building local chapters of the organization and putting up cultural events offline – from educational ‘history lessons’ to protests leveled at the authorities for their mishandling of various social issues.

The Revival Political Party is an example of a nationalist, populist organization that competently navigates the affordances of digital media. It has managed to attract in its ranks young members with computer and public relations backgrounds who maintain its communication channels professionally and effectively. While its declared ideal of blossoming Bulgarian greatness is located in the medieval past, it employs the latest digital communication tools proficiently to expand its participatory capacity in a carefully monitored and controlled way.

A revival of the glorious time of Bulgarian national prosperity and pride is the stridently stated goal also of the ‘Vassil Levski’ Military Union and the Shipka Bulgarian National Movement,² twin organizations set up as NGOs that errupted into public view in 2015–2016 with their extreme positions and actions against allowing Syrian refugees into the country. These actions included the formation of paramilitary groups that set out to chase and capture migrants from the Middle East who crossed the border into Bulgaria illegally. The language used in the organizations media as well as in the interview we conducted with its spokes person is harsher and its illiberalism more pronounced.

In a 2016 radio interview, the two organizations’ spokesperson, Vladimir Russev, stated that their combined membership comprised about 24,000 people (Darik News 2016). The Military Union ‘Vassil Levski’ brings together army and police veteranswith the objective to defend their professional and civic rights and to undertake ‘military-patriotic education of the young generations’ intended to counteract the ‘falsification of Bulgarian history and the imposition of educational standards that erase the Bulgarian national traditions and family values’. The Shipka Bulgarian National Movement (Shipka BNM),³’ for its part, draws members from a broader social pool including all walks of life. This organization stands for its own version of a “new accelerated national revival” and for ‘securing order in the country’ (Vladimir Russev, research interview). First and foremost, this order would entail the rounding up of those ‘who robbed us all and sold out Bulgaria to native and foreign criminals’ and handing them over to the legal authorities to be investigated and prosecuted.

Depicted by the paintbrush of Shipka BNM's spokesperson, the situation in Bulgaria also appears as national carnage. The country, he argues, has been pushed back in its development by decades: its once prosperous factories are in shambles; its previously modern, mechanized agriculture is fragmented and reduced to the use of primitive tools such as the wooden plough. Its erstwhile excellent educational system that has produced world-class scientists is ruined. Therefore, the goals of his organization are to recover and re-construct the economy, to introduce new technologies, innovative industries, education and medicine so that Bulgaria could take its rightful place in the world. Later in our conversation, it becomes clear that the organizations advocate for substantial socio-economic transformations, namely, the confiscation of private ownership of all production facilities in strategic industrial areas such as natural resources, energy, telecommunication and transportation because they represent important elements of Bulgaria's national security. The abolition of hired labour throughout the economy constitutes another essential demand. They insist that any enterprise beyond the scale of a family operation be built as a cooperative so that there is no exploitation of workers. The stimulation of education, science and technological innovation that, in their view, can only thrive with strong financial support from the state is another key principle of the envisioned national reconstruction. Maintaining robust security and intelligence agencies also figures as a necessary condition in the political program our interviewee lays out. It is worth noting that while the Bulgarian golden age that the previously discussed Revival party highlights have allegedly occurred in medieval times, Vladimir Russev expresses his organization's nostalgia for the achievements of the socialist period that ended in 1989. In that respect, Shipka BNM's program differs from Revival's timid gesturing in the direction of individual initiative and entrepreneurship. Shipka BNM unapologetically insists on an economic remodeling based on socialist–statist principles. Also, in contrast with Revival, the Shipka BNM representative categorically denies any aspiration at forming a political party. To be striving for access to state power in Bulgaria comes with a significant element of stigma that sits uncomfortably in a populist program.

Asked about the socio-demographic makeup of his movement supporters, Vladimir Russev boils it down to two main features – wide diversity including every social group between laborers and university scientists and public servants, but with one thing in common, the fact that all of them are ‘poor’. Poor in his definition means people who have not benefited from the privatization to which the economic assets of the socialist state were subjected after 1989. To the extent that there are businessmen in Shipka BNM's ranks, those are individuals who operate small-scale enterprises they have built themselves without tapping into the money ‘stolen’ from the state:

This reoccurring element in the narrative produced by the organizations examined in this study flags a major fault line running through Bulgarian society: the division between the winners and the losers of the post-socialist transition. While on the face of it, the rightful indignation of the honest citizen against the thieving economic and political elites rings in Vladimir Russev's words, that resentment quickly boils over and engulfs all those who have supported the post-socialist transition and possibly benefited from it in different ways such as open borders, educational opportunities, liberal values, minority rights, etc. First among those categories of resented fellow-citizens happen to be the activists of liberal civil society organizations.

Our interviewee's depiction of downfall and destruction culminates in a conspiracy-driven analysis of the Yugoslav wars from the 1990s, the Arab Spring and the Syrian war and refugee crisis. In all of these developments, he sees a plot by Islamists actively assisted by Western diplomatic and secret services. For him, there is little doubt that a substantive portion of the migrants crossing into the country are ISIS fighters with ‘special assignments:’

The fear of how international developments would affect Bulgaria with its Muslim minority and its location on the border between the Christian and the Muslim worlds, Vladimir Russev explains, has compelled his organization to leave aside its plans for peaceful national rebuilding and to focus on the task of defending the country's borders that the corrupt state administration was unable and unwilling to do properly. Thus, while in our interview the organizations’ spokesperson emphasizes the noble desire of members to ensure that the norms articulated in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be observed in Bulgaria, the Military Union and the Shipka BNM Movement made news with their exploits near the Bulgarian southern border where their ‘sympathizers’ organized in paramilitary units chased and captured migrants (see Alexandrova 2016, Spassov 2017). Despite the fact that they declare their aspirations to see Bulgaria sovereign and independent from any foreign influence, ‘be it from the East or the West’, critics allege that their paramilitary activists were trained and financed by Russia (see Papakochev 2016) or alternatively, by PEGIDA (Rumenov 2016).

Like Revival's leader, Vladimir Russev has a major ax to grind with the country's mainstream media. In his verdict, they are all ‘paid’ to serve special interests. (To be paid to do any kind of ideological, advocacy or political work is a major sin in the Bulgarian populist imaginary.) His own organizations, he feels, are either ignored or falsely portrayed. Russev complains that apart from three or four short interviews, everything else concerning their activities that has been aired in the public domain contains gross lies and extreme mischaracterizations: ‘criminals’, ‘gangsters’, ‘murderers’, ‘Nazis’, ‘fascists’, ‘white jihadists’ and many more qualifications of this kind.

While the Revival leader explains the stonewalling of his organization by the mainstream media with vicious plotting by rival and more powerful patriotic parties, Vladimir Russev spots the interests that the mainstream media are allegedly paid to serve not in the country's oligarchic enclaves, but in an entirely different place – none other than the country's liberal NGOs. A fury of resentment for the liberal civil society organizations, especially for human rights advocates, is set off by every mention our interviewee makes of their causes, activities, or presumed sponsors. Vladimir Russev is adamant that these organizations are being showered with money coming from conniving foreign sponsors. He cites millions of Euro and dollars as supposedly being granted or otherwise channeled to these organizations by external forces that strive to:

In the impassioned soliloquy of the Shipka BNM representative, the enemy of the nation comprises not only the political class, but also another agent of liberalism – the human rights NGOs that he believes are controlled by Western sponsors such as George Soros, America for Bulgaria Foundation, and the Friedrich Ebert Foundation among others. Vladimir Russev wants these organizations uncompromisingly closed and banned. He makes no bones about the unfettered antagonism between these liberal civil society actors and his own movement. In the same breadth, however, he invokes the discourse of a critical and politically relevant civil society, one that monitors the government's spending and exerts pressure over state policies. The liberal NGOs in his judgement are categorically not capable of being that kind of civil society:

Unlike the Revival leader, The Shipka activist does not hold much trust in social media as a way out of the mainstream media blackout he believes is imposed on his organization:

On another occasion, when Shipka BNM wanted to publish an announcement about an event they were organizing, that post was ‘reported’ and they were blocked from using the platform for 17 days. ‘The only option would be to have a network of some kind that is not owned by someone like Zuckerberg and all kinds of others. There is no other way to convey free ideas,’ the organization leaders concluded.

These episodes highlight the conflictual relationship between different citizen groups operating on the terrain of civil society in Bulgaria. This struggle for prominence, influence and ultimately, a hegemonic position results in significant fragmentation. Digital media become a playing field for this conflict and special techniques are invented by all sides in order to reduce each other's visibility and to smother each other's message.

Comparing the use of digital media by the Revival movement and the Shipka BNM activists suggests a generational difference in media savvy between the two patriot organizations. The Revival activists hail the affordances they find in Facebook and draw on them to craft their public image and streamline their internal communication. For Vladimir Russev and his fellow activists, we learn, social media have arrived ‘a bit late’ and it is difficult to figure out what to do with them. Russev notes that his organization cannot afford paid professional help in that regard. Thus, their abilities are rather limited: they are not professionally trained to work competently with computers, to use methods from ‘personality psychology,’, the ‘psychology of the crowd’; they are not technologically equipped to create ‘really effective clips and materials that can change social attitudes’. Their liberal enemies, on the other hand, our interviewee claims, are generously financed with ‘piles of money’ to enable them to do just that.

Thankfully, his movement, Vladimir Russev informs us, has ‘sympathizers’ and loyal supporters outside the country, presumably Bulgarians living abroad. Some of them work as programmers and technical professionals in the United States. These supporters have taken it upon themselves to create the organization's website and Facebook page. They are the ones who are paying for the hosting and the domain name used by the organization. Interestingly, and in contradiction to his condemnation of the Arab Spring events, Vladimir Russev notes that these Bulgarian expats have taken their cues regarding how social media can be put in service to a rebellious social movement precisely from the Arab Spring.

Despite the alleged absence of adequate financing and the attacks on the part of the ‘paid media’ and human rights organizations, at the time of the interview, Shipka BNM is focusing significant efforts on mobilizing ‘the Bulgarian people’ to protect its state borders. Groups of volunteers from across the country, in the depiction provided by our interviewee, are putting aside money from their ‘modest earnings and vacation days at the expense of their own families’ in order to join voluntary groups that patrol the border with Turkey and capture illegal immigrants. The organization does what it can to prepare them through military training, instruction at shooting ranges across the country and introduction to advanced intelligence techniques. Thus, maintaining the presence of the organization online goes hand in hand with tried and tested traditional methods of political and military organizing.

Organizations with illiberal ideologies may not fit into the definition of civil society actors articulated by the theory of liberal democracy and yet they are an important player in a Gramscian civil society riven by ideological contradictions and conflict. They create and vigorously defend their own ‘trenches and permanent fortifications’ (Gramsci 1999: 503), from which they launch a fight against the hegemony of liberal ideas. In doing that, they appropriate the notion of civil society and equate it with ‘a people’ rising against liberal elites. The result of this conceptual equilibristic is twofold: a rejection of the legitimacy of the institutions of the liberal-democratic state and an elimination of the pluralist understanding of civil society. ‘The people’ is transmogrified into the homogenous and untouchable agent of populism.

That said, the rhetoric of illiberal group leaders pushes the sensitive buttons of legitimate popular grievances against ‘rent-seeking’ (Dimitrova 2018: 257) post-communist political elites that have captured the state and use its resources for private gain (Dimitrova 2018, Ganev 2014). Popular discontent with these practices and their economic and social implications opens a space for anti-elite mobilization. Illiberal groups insert themselves into that space through patriotic rhetoric and digital advocacy as civil society flag bearers and potential saviors should they be trusted with the power to govern. It is notable that while the two organizations examined here differ in the social profile of their adherents and the inflection of their advocated economic policies, they put into play similar strategies. Both of them appeal to the popular disappointment with the excesses of neoliberalism, the nostalgia for the social security of the state-socialist era and particularly, to Bulgarians’ need for meaningful collective identification and self-respect.

The very names chosen by the two organizations exhibit a pattern of another kind of appropriation – that of the sacred symbols of national history. Levski, Shipka and Revival are indices of revered figures and heroic events instilled into the national self-consciousness of generations of Bulgarians via erstwhile hegemonic discourses circulated through educational programs and public and political performances like celebrations, programmatic documents, etc. They are among the most widely accepted and strongly idealized denominators by which selfless service to the public good is measured. By adorning themselves with such symbolism, the groups in question jockey for recognition as representatives of the pure, unified and disenfranchised ‘people’ their populist narratives construe.

In the hands of illiberal leaders, digital media become a lever for the pursuit of followship. The illiberal actors see in them the same affordances for establishing presence and stimulating participation that the liberal NGOs keenly draw on. There is certainly a difference in style. The websites and Facebook pages of the ‘patriotic’ organizations vigorously promote the figures and pronouncements of their leaders trying to turn them into popular celebrities. Digital media are used as pulpits for the propagation of a predetermined set of unquestionable ideas (e.g. national pride and prosperity that need to be revived) rather than as a space for deliberation and collaborative construction of collective action frames. They stoke negative emotions by inviting people to buy into a dismal view on society and politics that generates outrage and contention. From their digital fortifications, they openly attack liberal citizen organizations and groups and thus induce intolerance and antagonism in civil society itself.

In the mid-1970s, German political scientist Elizabeth Noel-Neuman (1974) proposed the model of the so called ‘spiral of silence’. Simply put, the model stipulates that individuals who hold opinions they perceive to be unpopular and only held by a minority, fall into a downward spiral of silencing themselves out of fear of social isolation and even punishment. The mass media of the late twentieth century were instrumental in creating the spiral dynamic as they were often in consonance with one another, giving the views they trumpeted the status of dominant public opinion or commonsense. Since their early years, digital media have proven to be a vehicle for counteracting and eventually reversing the spiral of silence mechanism. Individuals holding views perceived to belong in the silent minority have been able to break out of their social isolation and ultimately out of their silence. Carriers of unpopular opinions scarcely represented in the mass media have been able to find each other and to build their own online ‘fortresses’ (Gramsci 1999: 494) of expression and mutual affirmation, creating upward spirals of vocal contention. Social media have expanded this process on a massive scale. They help intensify the struggles for power and hegemony that rage in civil society and further enhance its conflictual nature – in a stark contrast from the view that portrays it as ‘some kind of benign or neutral zone where different elements of society operate and compete freely and on equal terms’ (Buttigieg 1995: 27).

In post-communist Europe, for a long time, liberal rhetoric in the official public sphere has been sweeping the reality of economic injustice and deprivation experienced by many citizens under the carpet and into a spiral of silence. Social media, on the other hand, have given rise to spirals of contention directed against corrupt political and economic elites. The rage of disenfranchized citizens channeled through these new vehicles of collective expression is an authentic cultural force that must be reckoned with. It is no wonder that aspiring populist leaders and ideologues attempt to ride the energy of these spirals in their pursuit of influence and power. Some mainstream media outlets have rushed to capitalize on that process too. Taken together, these convergent cross-media trends generate a jet stream of illiberal discourses preying on popular discontent and undermining the authority of liberal values. Given the close intertwinement between civil and political society, illiberal political parties can become the ultimate beneficiaries. In the short term, however, a peculiar irony plays out: the attacks on liberal NGOs launched by organizations like Revival and Shipka BNM leads the two camps to commit excessive energy to fighting each other. As a result, their ability to function as a democratic corrective to those same elites that illiberal actors so vehemently condemn is compromised and severely diminished.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Dr. Maria Bakardjieva is a professor and the current Chair in Communication and Media Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Calgary. Her research examines the evolution of the Internet and the use of digital media in various cultural and practical contexts with a focus on user agency, critical reflexivity and emancipation. Her books include Internet Society: The Internet in Everyday Life (2005) and Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality (2017) co-edited with Robert Gehl. Her latest book, Digital Media and the Dynamics of Civil Society: Retooling Citizenship in New EU Democracies (2021), co-authored with Stina Bengtsson, Göran Bolin, and Kjell Engelbrekt, is based on a research project that investigated the role digital media play in citizen engagement and democratic participation.