Description
Recently, increased academic attention has been paid to the role of narratives surrounding trauma and humiliation in populist political discourse. Originally, this attention largely examined the narrative responses of populist political figures to the genuine grievances of the people they claim to represent (cf. Homolar and Löfflmann 2021; Giurlando 2020; Hochschild 2016). Contrastingly, an emergent body of literature focuses on the active construction by political elites of the traumas and humiliations underpinning these narratives, through the manipulation of politicised readings of historical events (cf. Toomey 2018; Freistein et. al. 2022). We contribute to this latter approach by examining the case of Bulgaria, where conservative and liberal elites both lay claims to being the ‘true’ agents responsible for resolving the ‘traumas’ of the country’s communist past. This is based on a broadly shared construction of the nature of Bulgarian communism, and its (assumed) function as the main obstacle to the rectification of the country’s economic and social challenges and for its future westwards foreign policy orientation. Yet, despite advancing similar narratives surrounding the trauma inflicted on the country’s people by the past regime, conservatives and liberals in Bulgaria use this historic trauma to legitimise (or delegitimise) the policies and practices of their opponents as being necessary for the country’s restitution. In doing so both groups ensure strict adherence to specific policy positions (i.e. support for a free market economy, westward foreign policy orientation). We demonstrate that this delegtimisation and policy control stems from competing narratives of who ought to be considered the true ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ of the crimes of the past.
