Like Putin’s Russia, Bulgaria has become a mafia state

In a historic speech to the US Congress on 12 March 1947, President Truman addressed the menacing spread of Communism and the Soviet take-over of Eastern Europe. Known as the ‘Truman Doctrine’, he portrayed the battle lines for the Cold War as a struggle between autocracy and democracy – something which resonates uncannily today in Ukraine.

The Soviet ‘way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority’, declared President Truman. ‘It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedoms…The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms’.

Today the country in the European Union that most resembles that authoritarian oppressive state is Bulgaria, which faces an existential crisis. It has slipped into an autocracy governed by a political elite that has circumvented an independent judiciary and entrenched a culture of impunity.