The failure to restore the monarchy in post-communist Bulgaria.

• Author: Vassilev, Rossen
• Position: Report

Introduction

Despite sharp elite disagreements about the timing and nature of the constituent process, Bulgaria was the first country in post-Communist Europe to reach a constitutional settlement, setting this southeast European nation on a rocky course of political and economic reforms. Under its new constitution, adopted on 12 July 1991, Bulgaria is a parliamentary republic in which all legislative power is vested in a unicameral National Assembly, consisting of 240 deputies elected for four years by universal adult suffrage. The President of the Republic is a largely ceremonial head of state who is directly elected by the voters to a five-year term and can serve only two consecutive terms in office. The Council of Ministers, the highest organ of the executive branch, is approved by and responsible to the National Assembly. The Council is headed by a Prime Minister elected by the legislative majority. The judiciary is constitutionally independent from the executive and legislative branches of government. Its top bodies are a Supreme Court, the highest court of appeals in the country, and a Constitutional Court with powers of judicial review.

But the adoption of a new constitution was accompanied by serious political opposition and heated controversy. There was strong resistance by many members of the anti-Communist minority in the constituent Grand National Assembly (GNA), who did not want the new fundamental law to be shaped by what they called the "temporary majority" of the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). They called for early dissolution of the constitution-writing Assembly popularly elected in June 1990 and the holding of a new GNA election. The monarchists within the oppositional and fervently anti-Communist Union of Democratic Forces (SDS) alliance rejected the new basic charter because it retained the republican form of government, while they preferred a return to the Turnovo Constitution of 1879, which had declared Bulgaria a constitutional kingdom. They believed that new elections could produce a constituent Assembly more favorable to the idea of reinstating the monarchy, which had been abolished in 1946.

However, the two largest SDS member parties, the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party (BSDP) and the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS)-Nikola Petkov, announced the formation of a splinter faction, the SDS-Center, which opposed the attempts of the "rightist and monarchist forces" to divert the GNA from its constitutional work. (1) The new coalition was particularly critical of "the emerging monarchist right wing" in the SDS (2), declaring that "it would be a crime to demand the dissolving of parliament before it has adopted the constitution (3)." The SDS-Center leaders were convinced that the parties calling for the dissolution of the GNA before the adoption of the new constitution were directly manipulated by the Madrid-based King Simeon II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and that their ultimate goal was the restoration of the monarchy and the enthronement of the exiled monarch. Other centrist SDS member parties formed another splinter group, the SDS-Liberals, which declared its support for the pro-republican stand of the SDS-Center. The anti-Communist opposition had in effect become split between opposing factions with conflicting views about the nature of the new constitution and whether Bulgaria should have a republican or monarchical form of government (4). The republican-versus-monarchist division added a major new dimension to the country's ideological cleavages and deep partisan animosities.

The controversial attempt by radical SDS deputies to disrupt the constituent work of the GNA-first by a parliamentary walkout and then by a last-minute hunger strike-failed, but the divisive republic-versus-monarchy issue remained open-ended for a long time. Some 81 of the 400 GNA deputies did not vote in favor of the 1991 basic law, nor was it subsequently approved in any national referendum. The abstention of the opposing SDS deputies was motivated at least in part by their fundamental opposition to the constitutional clauses defining Bulgaria as a parliamentary republic.

With the adoption of the 1991 constitution, whose amendment clauses (Chapter Nine) make it very difficult to revise the republican form of the Bulgarian government, the restoration of the monarchy seemed like an idea consigned to the past. This was until Simeon II, who had never abdicated the throne, became the first exiled monarch to return to his post-Communist homeland as a popularly elected head of government. He could not have become a constitutional monarch so easily, given the legislative supermajority that is required to amend the Constitution and the fact that over 80% of Bulgarians say that they are in favor of their country remaining a republic, but in 2001 his chances of returning to the throne looked far better than any of the other would-be monarchs of Central, Eastern or Southeastern Europe (5).

A constitutional monarchy has not been contemplated as a serious institutional choice for post-Communist Europe's constitutional design despite the fact that many of these transitional countries were monarchies in their pre-Communist past and that seven out of the current members of the European Union (EU)-which Bulgaria joined in 2007-are constitutional monarchies (the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg).

Given the total disillusionment of most Bulgarians with the post-Communist parties and politicians, Simeon's chances of regaining the throne appeared to be quite significant in June 2001, when his National Movement for Simeon II (NDSII) unexpectedly won the general election. But his party, which controlled both the national legislature and the cabinet government in 2001-2005 and initially elicited very strong popular support, failed to capitalize on the discontent of the mass public and became embroiled in a series of serious missteps and scandals, which destroyed the credibility of the prime-minister-king and led to his defeat in the June 2005 elections. As a result of that election, NDSII became the junior partner in a three-party coalition cabinet with the Socialists and the ethnic Turk-dominated Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), whose failing policies have further undermined the ex-King's popularity. But what seems to have put an end once and for all to the very idea of restoring the monarchy in post-Communist Bulgaria is, paradoxically enough, the former monarch's own controversial personality and actions.

The Monarchy-versus-Republic Controversy

There were significant political forces in post-Communist Bulgaria, especially the monarchists and some of the conservative parties, which challenged the present republican form of government as illegitimate and imposed illegally by the Communists. A national referendum held on 8 September 1946 abolished the monarchy in favor of a people's republic, leading to the exile of the Italian-born Queen Joanna of Savoy and her adolescent son, Simeon II, who had been crowned at the age of six in 1943 after the sudden death of his father, King Boris III. Discredited by its subversion of the constitution at home and its wartime alliance with Hitler, the monarchy was genuinely unpopular, but the referendum results were so skewed (85.18% voted for a people's republic and only 3.89% for the monarchy) that fraud was widely suspected (6).

Soon after the fall of Communist leader Todor Zhivkov on November 10, 1989, monarchist groups began campaigning for the return of Bulgaria's number one political emigre, the exiled former king, and for a plebiscite on whether Bulgaria should be a republic or a monarchy (7). The prevailing opinion among the anti-Communist parties was that the Communist regime had manipulated the 1946 referendum abolishing the monarchy and many of them rejected the legality of its results. The monarchists and some conservative parties within the oppositional SDS alliance publicly declared their adherence to the Turnovo Constitution of 1879 and demanded the country's reversion to monarchism. Written by Imperial Russia and the other Great Powers at the Berlin Congress of 1878 and modeled on the Belgian constitution of 1830, the Turnovo Constitution defined Bulgaria as a constitutional monarchy, in which the crowned head of state had the limited prerogatives assigned to rulers of constitutional monarchies such as the United Kingdom or Belgium. Constitutionally, principal power in the government resided in a unicameral parliament, the National Assembly. But since the prime minister and the cabinet depended on the monarch's will rather than the confidence of parliament, the National Assembly wielded only nominal power over the executive and had relatively minor influence on government decision-making. Royal supremacy was aided by a weak legal framework for legislative control over the crown, allowing Simeon's grand-father, the German-born Prince Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, to establish a strong personal regime and rule autocratically between 1887 and 1918 in spite of the liberal spirit of the constitution (8).

While its historical record is hardly inspiring, the Turnovo Constitution still presented the post-Communist political elite recruited through the June 1990 founding election with the option of reviving the monarchy. From his exile in Madrid, Simeon was openly encouraging the restoration efforts of the royalist groups by advertising the "advantages" of constitutional monarchy over the parliamentary republic declared by the 1991 constitution:

That the new Constitution has been greeted with mixed feelings-to put it mildly-speaks for itself. I have no degree in constitutional law, so I make no pronouncement, but the Turnovo Constitution is more liberal than this first attempt [of Bulgaria] to become a state of law. Constitutions in any democracy may be amended, so this is the line along which our legislators...