‘Ill Liberalism’ in Bulgaria Following the Tabloidisation of Commercial Media in the 1990s and 2000s

The next speaker in this ECREA 2024 session is Martin Marinos, whose interest is in populism and the far right in Bulgaria. He begins by challenging the notion of illiberalism, suggesting that the opposition between liberalism and illiberalism is not absolute, and that many countries instead display a kind of ‘ill liberalism’ instead. Historically, too, liberalism has sometimes led to the emergence of far-right regimes, so the border between liberalism and fascism is somewhat porous. Especially on economic matters, there are certainly sometimes parallels between liberalism and far-right authoritarianism in their support for an unrestrained capitalism.

Notably, for instance, the German Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung media group bought up much of the Bulgarian media market from the mid-1990s onwards, taking advantage of financial crises in the country; this moved the Bulgarian media environment notably towards tabloidisation, and opened the door to populist politics that also had strong nationalist and racist components (especially targetting the ethnic Roma minority).

This was not necessarily a company strategy driven by the new German owners; instead, they simply cared about the return in revenue, and gave their Bulgarian editors free reign – even though the WAZ Group had signed up to anti-racist European principles. At the same time, they made no efforts to engage in in-depth and investigative journalism, for instance. Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation also moved into the Bulgarian broadcast marked in the 2000s, and pursued a similarly populist approach; it installed several populist and far-right news anchors, some of whom also transitioned as candidates into formal politics.