Civil Society Organizations as a Catalyst for Political Change in the Republic of Bulgaria

Abstract

The goal of this article is to examine the processes of formation and development of civil society organizations in Bulgaria that opposed the official policy of the Todor Zhivkov regime, the legitimation of their socio-political activities, and pluralism, which became a catalyst for transformational changes in Bulgarian society. The following objectives are addressed: a comprehensive analysis of the political situation in Bulgaria in the late 1980s was conducted, and the peculiarities of the emergence of dissident movements in the country, as well as the resistance of state authorities to their activities and the legitimation of the first CSOs, are examined. The article uses a neo-institutional methodological approach and a number of methods: comparative, analysis, descriptive, functional, etc. It is argued that all spheres of the country's internal life during this period were affected by creeping systemic crises that urgently required change. External factors such as perestroika and the new foreign policy of the Soviet Union, as well as the abandonment of the Brezhnev doctrine, also contributed to this. The combination of internal and external factors led to a surprising new quality of social change: a complex transformation of the political regime. The peculiarity of the political changes in Bulgaria was that they were catalyzed by civil society organizations and dissident structures that were formed not on ideological principles, but around ecological issues.