Sofia prepares to raise its game

Levski Sofia, Bulgaria’s top soccer team, made it into Europe a few months early, when it reached the group stage of the 2006-07 UEFA Champions League. Now the new member state is hoping to do even better than its football stars - who were eliminated by Barcelona, Chelsea and Werder Bremen.

Bulgaria is not much bigger than Austria and only a third of its dwindling population of around 7 million lives in the widely-abandoned countryside. Gross domestic product (GDP) per person hovers below €2,700, as many as one in ten are estimated to be living in poverty and economic conditions for most of its citizens are indisputably tough. Political paralysis and the persistence of vested interests held back reform and delayed transition to a market economy for more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet empire.

Determined action by more far-sighted Bulgarians is starting to pay off, and the country now has everything to play for as it enters the European Union.

Economic growth rose to 6.1% per cent in the first half of 2006 and international organisations agree Bulgaria has recently made admirable progress across a wide range of reforms. Foreign direct investment has risen sharply to around €2 billion a year. Even small-scale privatisation is nearing completion and sloppy supervision of leasing and insurance companies - until recently a favoured domain of mobsters - has been tightened. But inflation remains volatile, and the current account deficit is disturbingly high.

Worse, as EU officials made clear yet again almost on the eve of accession, the legal and administrative framework is incomplete. The national civil aviation administration is so unreliable and ill-trained is that it is not considered competent to ensure the safety of Bulgarian planes. And the country is under close EU scrutiny on a long list of deficiencies ranging from law and order to the operation of the internal market.

At the heart of many of these challenges is the continuing inability of the country to extricate itself fully from the shadows of the last fifty years. A legacy of corruption in public administration and weakness in the judiciary have allowed organised crime to prosper. Many questions remain unanswered about the role of current political figures in the regimes of the past. And a torpor, the hangover of decades of planned-economy passivity, weighs upon business development and personal initiative.

Yet this is land that produced Spartacus, the most famous son of that Thracian civilisation equally renowned for its spectacular gold treasures and its cult of wins. It is the birthplace of the Cyrillic alphabet - developed in the 10th century when Bulgarian culture dominated the region and now one of the world’s principal alphabets. It is the home of a vigorous orthodox Christianity that survived centuries of Ottoman repression to become a central feature of Bulgaria‘s resurgence as an independent state in the 19th century. And more recently, it was the training ground for many of the highly-skilled engineers that drove eastern European progress in the interwar years. Even the father of modern computers, John Atasanoff, came from a Bulgarian family.

Part of Bulgaria’s dilemma springs from its fractured history. The 20th century scarred it harshly - with successive military defeats, bloody rebellion, repeated territorial conflicts and, to cap nearly 50 years of Soviet domination, a final decade of political and economic turmoil. Tensions persist with its large ethnic Turkish population - around 10%, a vestige of Ottoman occupation and subject to cruel mistreatment under communist rule. The Roma population is estimated at around 5%, and remains imperfectly integrated. And a complex historical dispute continues to fuel regional tensions with Macedonian nationalists.

Since 2001 Bulgaria has enjoyed increasing stability and democracy, under a government led - paradoxically - by the country’s former king, and since 2005 by a socialist-dominated coalition. Bulgaria’s snow-capped mountains are finding new life as ski-resorts burgeon, the Danubian plain is coming again under the plough, and serried ranks of new hotels are covering every square centimetre of the resorts of the Black Sea coast. Because of its strategically important location as the land link from Europe to Asia and the Middle East, five of the ten Trans-European transport corridors run through its territory (even though the motorway from Sofia to the Black Sea still stops disappointingly short in mid-country).

At the start of 2007, Bulgaria is racing onto the pitch for its most crucial international fixture yet. The country is not short of pride or ambition or skills, but victory is going to depend on the entire team putting in a good performance.

The president

The president of Bulgaria is Georgi Parvanov, a 50-year-old who worked as a researcher in the Institute of History of the Bulgarian Communist Party during the 1980s and became a leading ideologue as the party reconfigured itself after Bulgaria’s independence. He claims to have "firmly put it on course towards European social democratic values". He was a leading member of parliament before being elected president in 2001 on a pro-European ticket. He won a second five-year term in a landslide victory in November 2006, beating nationalist Volen Siderov, leader of the right-wing populist and nationalist ATAKA party, who opposed EU accession. The Bulgarian constitution gives the president only limited powers: as head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces, he can do no more than delay the passage of bills, so influence depends largely on the incumbent’s personality. Parvanov argued strenuously - but unsuccessfully - against the EU’s imposition of post-accession monitoring.

The prime minister

The prime minister of Bulgaria since August 2005 has been Sergei Stanishev, who at the age of 39 found himself at the head of a coalition painfully constructed after the indecisive parliamentary election two months earlier. He is chairman of the former communist Bulgarian Socialist Party and rose to prominence as his party’s foreign policy adviser, entering parliament in 2001. The other coalition members include the National Movement Simeon II - which headed the previous coalition, under the former king, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha - and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, which principally represents the Turkish minority. Stanishev was born in Ukraine and studied in Moscow, as well as at the London School of Economics. His PhD thesis was on ‘The system of career development of state dignitaries in Russia and its transformation in the second half of the 19th century’. He promised to intensify the campaign against corruption and organised crime, but his government still faces criticism for its lack of tangible progress.

Levski Sofia, Bulgaria’s top soccer team, made it into Europe a few months early, when it reached the group stage of the 2006-07 UEFA Champions League. Now the new member state is hoping to do even better than its football stars - who were eliminated by Barcelona, Chelsea and Werder Bremen.