Civil Society and Party Politics in Bulgaria after 2013: A Gramscian Look

In 2013 Bulgaria was shaken by two waves of mass protests, which seemed to mobilise distinct social groups and put different, and often conflicting, demands on the table. In the midst of the turbulence of the protests, new political formations emerged, which aimed to capitalize on the mobilizations. The mushrooming of new political projects in the wake of the mass protests seems to mark an apparent re-politicization following the post-political turn after 1989. Yet the language and identities of these new civic and party formations point to a more complicated dynamic between civic movements, political parties, and the state. Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this paper scrutinizes the links between the newly emerged political projects and the civic mobilizations of 2013 to unravel the new social cleavages underpinning them and consider how these are played out in a context of a changed relationship between civil society and party politics twenty-five years after the fall of the socialist regime in Bulgaria.