Boyko Borisov, Delyan Peevski and the role of German foundations in Bulgaria News and analysis from Bulgaria | DW
Mr. Martens, you have been monitoring and analyzing the Balkans and Southeast Europe for 20 years, and before that Russia for 5 years. Is the refusal of Bulgaria and Romania to join the Schengen area effective in exerting pressure for reforms?
Michael Martens: My impression from conversations with diplomats in Bulgaria and some people in Berlin is that the most effective tool for reforms may not be Schengen, but the 6.3 billion euros that Bulgaria expects from the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism. The conditions for obtaining this are that 22 laws be passed. The idea is that these funds will flow to Bulgaria only if the country implements a set of reforms, including introducing the accountability of the Prosecutor General. This is considered more effective.
Just a few days ago, we negotiated with the former Minister of Justice of Romania. He said the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism could never work. But the approach of withholding the money in the absence of judicial reforms could work much better.
Otherwise, if you ask me exactly what the Netherlands and Austria want to achieve, I am not very sure that they themselves know it. We are all clear that this is more of a veto for internal use, not so much aimed at Bulgaria as at the internal audience.
How clear is Europe that part of the EU money for Bulgaria goes to the mafia?
Michael Martens: I have been writing about South Eastern Europe for 20 years. One of the facts you have had to accept is that very few people in Germany are interested in what is happening in Southeast Europe. Perhaps part of the explanation for the phenomenon he describes is that from the vantage point of Paris, Berlin, even Madrid, and before that, London, SE Europe is known to exist, it is there, but almost no one sees it very closely. There is a very small group of people who follow what is happening.
If you go to Berlin and ask someone what they think about the lack of accountability of the Prosecutor General in Bulgaria, I would say that even 98% of the politicians will not understand what exactly it is about. For the definition of people in Bulgaria, this is really good, because if no one cares, they can continue playing the games.
Viktor Orbán, on the other hand, plays his game in a much different way. He says: “I am against you and I say it to your face”, while from Bulgaria the message to the EU is rather: “We like everything you do, but you leave us at home to do what we prefer”.
A source in what I consider to be a reliable camp told me years ago that Boyko Borissov was complaining because Orbán was trying to influence him: “Boiko, come to ours, position yourself against Merkel.” Of course, I can’t be completely sure of this since I wasn’t present, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true.
Years ago you published an extremely interesting article that traces the connections between the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), a clone of his “Hans Seidel” foundation in Bulgaria and created by GERB with Boyko Borisov. What can such relations be called – political engineering, German “soft power” or something else?
Michael Martens: I think it’s a mixture of all of these. To answer this question, one must understand what German political foundations are. Parliamentary parties have their own funds. The funds with which they work come from the taxpayer, and their amount is determined depending on the last three parliamentary votes in Germany. Or roughly speaking, you are paid before the last 12 years.
When foundations send someone abroad, they always tell them: do good projects to strengthen democracy. But one of the things they always want is to find local political partners, and here I am not referring to Bulgaria specifically. And when the country is in the EU, this becomes even more important because the local partner is expected to vote together with the common political family in the lower parliament. So there is real competition between foundations for political partners. Of course, there is a definition of boundaries and not every foundation can be affiliated with any party.
I came to Bulgaria for the first time before 2002 and at one of my first meetings I met Mr. Wolfgang Glezker, the then director of Hans Seidel. He told me that there is a great political talent in this country who can actually make a difference. This was Mr. Borisov, now the Chief Secretary of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who, according to him, is not pro-Russian. Mr. Glezker, who is looking for a partner, described him as “a kind of political animal” (according to Aristotle). And even though he didn’t tell me directly, I got the impression that the Hans Seidel Foundation believed that this man shared our values. With the security of the foundation, they have been shown exactly that. Borisov, you know how to play the game. Glezker was the first to realize his potential, had a close relationship, visits to Munich, etc. In a certain sense, Borisov is a political genius and there is no need to whine, but the fact that you had international partners helped him.
In retrospect, are the CSU members satisfied with their support for Borissov and his party?
Michael Martens: You should ask them, not me. But we also have to have this important debate in Germany about the work of political foundations. The problem is that no one is following her. Most people may have heard of foundations, but they don’t know exactly what they do, especially across the border. I think this represents a whole process, we have to ask ourselves – who are our partners and what do they really look like for the democratization of countries. And true pro-Europeans, formerly those who believe in Europe, I don’t say left or right, might ask themselves how an association with the wrong party would affect your image among the local population.
If the Friedrich Naumann Foundation says that the DPS is their partner, do you take that as a confidence that the German states support democratic change? Or is the opposite true? If the Friedrich Naumann Foundation ended your cooperation with DPS, as it recently did, and sought a non-corrupt partner, wouldn’t that send a much stronger message?
Tell more about the termination of relations between the German liberal foundation and DPS, this is not yet known in Bulgaria.
Michael Martens: The first information that the foundation plans to end its cooperation with DPS and cut ties with them came in June from sources I believe to be reliable. And just a few days ago, three sources, one German and two Bulgarian, stated that this plan had meanwhile been implemented.
In an earlier conversation a few months ago, I was told that it was counterproductive for the image of German democracy in Bulgaria to be associated with Delyan Peevski, and that this should be stopped sooner rather than later. Of course, I am not a spokesperson for the Friedrich Naumann Foundation, so only they can officially say what their motives were.
Michael Martens is a long-time Southeast Europe correspondent for every German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He was born in Hamburg in 1973. Dimitar Ganev talks to him.