Jana Tsoneva is pursuing a PhD in sociology at the Central European University in Budapest. She works in the fields of political and economic sociology and is a member of the Collective for Social Interventions, Sofia.
For decades, Europe’s big economies outsourced the problem of pollution by literally shipping their trash to China. When Beijing banned the toxic trade in 2018, it could have served as a wake-up call — but instead, the big polluters have rerouted their garbage to low-wage, low-regulation countries inside the European Union.
In Bulgaria, campaigns that equate Communism with Nazism aren’t about defending democracy against “Russian meddling,” they’re about rehabilitating Bulgarian fascism and its complicity in the Holocaust.
Air pollution in cities like Sofia leads to thousands of deaths every year. While media blame the crisis on consumer habits, the real problem is decades of real estate speculation and unplanned capitalist development.
One year after the Bolsheviks ended Russia’s participation in World War I, revolutionary soldiers in Bulgaria forced their government to do the same.
Bulgaria’s recent elections show how narrow the country’s political options have become.