Bulgarian far-right visit Moscow at invitation of Putin’s party

Bulgaria’s pro-Russian far-right Vazrazhdane (Revival) party sent a delegation to Moscow at the invitation of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party, according to an announcement by the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The Russian Foreign Ministry, which posted the announcement on its website, did not name the members of the delegation but published a photograph showing Vazrazhdane’s deputies Angel Georgiev, Kosta Stoyanov, Daniel Petrov and Ivelin Parvanov.

Later in the day, Vazrazhdane also announced their visit, saying that they had also been to Hungary and were about to go to Moldova and that they were “building partnerships all over the world”.

The Russian diplomatic service presented its work to the Bulgarian delegation, and the head of the Russian Institute for Current International Problems, V.B. Kozyulin, introduced projects such as the “Course for Young Wise Men”, “Politics of Historical Memory” and others, the release said.

The new foreign policy concept of the Russian Federation was also presented to the Bulgarian MPs, the Academy said. The Bulgarian MPs congratulated the Academy team on its 90th anniversary and wished it new successes and achievements.

Vazrazhdane is the third political force in the Bulgarian Parliament, having won 14.3% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections. The party’s supporters come from pro-Russian circles in Bulgarian society. It competes for their votes with the Bulgarian Socialist Party and several other smaller pro-Russian parties.

The party is supported by the far-right, which does not want Bulgaria to join the eurozone and insists on neutrality in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The party’s supporters spread pro-Russian disinformation on social networks and called for Bulgaria’s withdrawal from NATO.

Vazrazhdane tried unsuccessfully to provoke a referendum on Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro. A few days ago, the party’s Deyan Nikolov said in an interview for public television that Vazrazhdane would ask Bulgaria’s European partners to veto the country’s entry into the eurozone.

In June 2023, the leader of Vazrazhdane, Kostadin Kostadinov, appeared at a diplomatic reception at the Russian embassy. He declared that Russia could only be Bulgaria’s partner and ally.

“If I were a Bulgarian citizen, I would vote for Kostadin Kostadinov,” the Russian ambassador to Bulgaria, Eleonora Mitrofanova, said in an interview a few months earlier.

Meanwhile, the small pro-Russian ABV party also announced that it had been invited to Moscow. ABV leader Rumen Petkov, a former Interior Minister (2005-2008) in the government of Sergei Stanishev (the former leader of the PES), will deliver a statement in Moscow on “Politico-legal aspects of counteraction against modern forms of neo-colonialism”.

These are the first visits by Bulgarian politicians to Moscow since the visit in 2023 of the Russian Nikolai Malinov – the leader of the Russophiles party, who is accused of espionage.

(Krassen Nikolov | Euractiv.bg)

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