Once upon a time in Tsargrad, the capital of a country not so far away, there lived a good Pasha. The country at that time was run by an evil sultan from a far away city in the centre of the country. The sultan had governed the country for over 20 years, and the common people were tired of his rule and the corruption that came with it. For many of the people of Tsargrad, and indeed the country as a whole, the good pasha, the son of an Imam, seemed like an honest man, and perhaps a man who could replace the Sultan, and return honesty to the empire. The sultan, well aware of the discontent amongst his people, had the good pasha thrown into the prison, and whilst the people of Tsargrad protested in the streets, and called for an end to the Sultan’s rule, the pasha rotted in his dungeon. 

We draw a parallel between events in Istanbul in the spring and events in Varna today to show the current trend in events happening across the region. Corruption has become the driving force bringing people out onto the streets to protest against government. In Greece, Serbia, and North Macedonia, the spark that led to the demonstrations was some disaster that led to loss of life. 

As is usual with these sort of disasters, people’s deaths were caused by poor safety standards, and cost cutting during construction in search for greater and greater profits. A look at the nightclub fire in Kočani, North Macedonia gives us a good example; “The nightclub was unlicensed and broke numerous safety standards: among other things, it lacked sprinklers, sufficient emergency exits, and only had a single fire extinguisher”. What then added to the tragedy was the run down state of the hospital system, and the fact that there were insufficient ambulances and medical staff to deal with the tragedy. Of course the terrifying thing about these sort of disasters is that the conditions that cause them are not unique to small towns in north Macedonia. Everyone knows that these sort of things are present all around them. Everyone knows that these sort healthcare system is falling apart as it is, and is completely incapable of dealing with more demands put on it by a disaster of this sort. It could be our children in that night club. 

So a fire in a nightclub, or the collapse of part of a railway station in Novi Sad, or a train crash in Greece are the events that led to protests from hundreds of thousands of people on the streets. In Bulgaria and Turkey, it has been the arrest of a mayor on corruption charges, that has caused people to go out and demonstrate. In all cases though ‘corruption’ is central to the story. 

In Istanbul, there are many people who believed in the ‘good pasha’, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Perhaps after over 20 years of the Sultan’s rule, people have forgotten how government was before Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and how he himself came to power by presenting himself and his party as something new, and untouched by the corruption of the state. 

Of course though Erdogan is no ‘sultan’ and İmamoğlu is not a ‘good pasha’ whatever people might hope for. Everybody knows that corruption is something that is at the heart of municipal government. Even if İmamoğlu himself isn’t personal corrupt, there will be connections to corruption. It’s impossible to imagine that Istanbul municipality, a city bigger than most European countries, runs without corruption of any kind. 

When we turn our eyes back to Bulgaria and toward Varna, we find it hard to believe that anyone sees that Blagomir Kotsev as a ‘good pasha’. To be honest the whole affair reminds us of the line from Marx “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Nobody imagines that Bulgarian politics is clean. Corruption is endemic is municipal government, and local businessmen with expensive foreign educations are in no way immune to it. If the state prosecutor can’t create a good case against Kotsev, then he is really not very good at his job.

Yet this prosecution, like the one in Istanbul, has not been launched because the mayor is corrupt. If this were the case, probably every mayor in the country would be standing in a courtroom. This is a case of those in government using corruption as a cover for an attack upon their political enemies. 

The enemies of those who are currently in power are not necessarily the friends of workers though. What we see here is two factions fighting it out over who controls the state, and who has the right to fill their pockets, and the pockets of their friends from municipal and state treasuries. There appears to be a real difference between the protests here and those, for example, in Serbia. 

In Serbia, there seems to have been genuine anger amongst large sectors of the population that people died because the bosses of various companies and the state needed to make more profits. The numbers involved in the protests have been truly massive, 350,000 people on demonstrations in Belgrade, a city of a similar size to Sofia, and 100,000 in Novi Sad, a city about the same size as Varna. Here the supporters of the mayor, and the Harvard Boys, manage to gather a few thousand people, primarily from their own party, and those dependent upon them for their jobs. 

It’s a fight between different factions over who has the right to fill their pockets at our expense. If the faction being persecuted today triumphs nobody imagines that it would bring an end to corruption, and bring about some new era of honesty. That’s something that we will leave for fairy stories. Rather, we would expect those that come to power to then be the ones having leaders and prominent members of the losing faction arrested. After all, it’s not like that hasn’t happened before.