LEGAL ALIEN: Bulgaria’s Big Brother and the Holding Company
Clive Leviev-Sawyer
SofiaEcho
THE new season of reality television show Big Brother has launched on Bulgarian television, and I for one intend to ignore it, except for the purposes of this week’s column.
More in the Orwellian sense, Big Brother seems a rather pervasive theme in Bulgaria at the moment, beyond the confines of the small screen. And even within the confines of the small screen, this season is certain to lack that vital something.
The vital something, in this case, was the plan to have had a Bulgarian Orthodox Church monk participate in the show. Archmandrite Pamfilii passed the casting to be approved as a contestant, beating thousands of other candidates, but his letter requesting the Holy Synod for permission to participate received no reply.
In the face of this mystic silence, he decided that it was better to withdraw. He had planned to wear his cassock, had received permission from the producers to have his Bible with him, along with other religious paraphernalia, and had planned to use his time on the show to do the work for which he has a vocation. Further, had he won, he intended to use the 200 000 leva prize money to endow a church and scholarships for gifted children. Intentions that, to my mind, were more than noble enough; and certainly he would have raised the tone of the show. Still, we have our consolations, in the other Big Brother shows, that currently stretch from Big Brother 2, to Infinity.
Big Brother 2 strikes me as a fair title for our own Interior Minister, Roumen Petkov, who is rapidly emerging as the strongman of the coalition Cabinet. In the days of the socialist bloc, the person holding this portfolio usually were effectively either the most powerful, or second most powerful, man (it was always a man) in the country. In those days, the Ministry of the Interior might have been known more appropriately as the Orwellian Ministry of Fear. Will Petkov strike fear into the fellows from the circles of organised crime? We shall see. More interestingly, one can dwell for the moment on the subject of Petkov’s “public council” of former interior ministers and ministry chief secretaries. For those who remember the band from the 1960s, may we safely refer to Petkov and this group as Big Brother and the Holding Company?
Speaking of former interior ministry chief secretaries, Big Brother 3 is, naturally, Boiko Borissov, now a candidate to be elected as mayor of Sofia. Reportedly, his campaign motto is to be “General Change” and, seemingly believing his own legend, he is emanating messages about how he is going to be Mr Tough Guy in running the city, should he win. Suggestions have been made in the Bulgarian-language press that, should Borissov win, he would play the blame game in the same way that he did when he was Bulgaria’s “top cop”. Meaning, failures would not be his fault – they would be the fault of unco-operative, obstructive or incompetent city councillors, rather in the same way that he used to blame the judiciary for failures in the fight against organised crime. Presumably, he knows to take his cues from the old Dirty Harry movies, where most audiences cheered on the take-no-prisoners cop and sneered at the addled system.
If one accepts the perspective of the ultra-nationalist group Ataka (and I, for one, do not) then Big Brother 4 is the International Monetary Fund. Yes, that IMF, the one that reportedly wants Bulgaria to write off arrears owed by highly-indebted countries, wants a lid on minimum salaries, and generally wants the purse strings knotted garrote-tight. Message to the critics: in some cases, Big Brother can be your friend, the variety that lends you money that you need, provided that you behave yourself properly. If you do not agree with this perspective, then you are Ataka uebergruppenfuehrer Volen Siderov, and you are probably not reading this anyway.
But there is Big Brother 5, perhaps the Biggest Brother of them all, and that is the European Commission. The Big Brother that will release its report in October on how Little Brother Bulgaria is coming along in preparing to join the European Brotherhood. (If you insist on political correctness, “European Family” sadly does not fit in with the theme). There is much speculation about what it is that the Big Brothers from Brussels will say, good and bad, about Bulgaria. It may be that we might refer to them as the Ministry of Truth.
