BULGARIA'S BOUNCERS

By Bruce W. Nelan

You earn $20 a month. In December the price of bread jumped 23%, and you spend a third of your salary on the daily loaf. The bank where you saved the proceeds of your ingenuity and hard work for the past seven years closed its doors eight months ago. You once had a car, but it was stolen. Inflation is devaluing the little cash you have at the annual rate of 310%. What do you do? You take to the streets and jump up and down to the roaring chant of "Anyone who doesn't jump is a Red."

It's slightly oddball but deadly serious. The power of the powerless is shaking Eastern Europe again as tens of thousands of Bulgarians fill the streets of Sofia each day to show just how fed up they are with their government of national disaster, a batch of renamed but unreconstructed communists who still balk at basic reforms. Inspired by two months of demonstrations in next-door Serbia, Bulgarian workers, students, doctors and civil servants are striking, marching and bouncing for change. Taxis sporting opposition flags block the roads, along with people clinging together in human chains. "I earn $21 a month," says Nikolai Ivanov, an airport border-control officer, between bounces. "Any other reason is irrelevant." Says Kiril Korchev, a road laborer: "The communists tricked us. But we're going to stop them. The people are no longer afraid."

Bulgaria was the most docile of the old Warsaw Pact states, and its bosses held onto the bobbing wreckage of the Soviet-era centralized economy long after the bloc broke up in 1989. The Communist Party, restyled the Socialist Party, has governed for four of the seven years since then, keeping 90% of the economy in the hands of the state. While inflation soared and wages plummeted, corrupt officials stripped the country of its assets, turning the rest of Bulgaria's 8.4 million people into some of the poorest in Europe. Bulgarians have had enough and are demanding that Parliament resign and call new elections.

Bulgarians voted for all the recent Socialist governments, of course, including the present one. But 1996 was their wake-up year, as the country neared bankruptcy and more than a dozen banks were closed. The Socialists, led by Zhan Videnov, a former regional chief of the Communist Youth, more than doubled energy prices and public transport fares. The central bank then boosted interest rates to 300% in an attempt to choke off inflation. An editorial last week in the newspaper Trud supplied what could have served as a straight line for Marie Antoinette: "Bread is becoming a luxury."

His own party forced Videnov to resign the prime ministership last November, and to replace him the Socialists have designated the unpopular Nikolai Dobrev, the hard-line Interior Minister. But the new, anticommunist President of Bulgaria, Petar Stoyanov, who was sworn in this week to the mostly ceremonial post, is insisting the Socialists get together with the opposition Union of Democratic Forces on a reform program and a date for early parliamentary elections. The Socialists had been holding out for the official close of their term at the end of 1998, but last week they grudgingly proposed going to the polls by the end of this year. The opposition wants a vote as soon as possible.

Even if opposition forces get their wish and win the next election, there is no guarantee that they can fix things. When the UDF took over in 1991, it lasted only a year before being tossed out. Its current leader and potential Prime Minister, Ivan Kostov, is an unflashy, bureaucratic type who was Finance Minister in the failed UDF government five years ago. He was not, however, a Communist Party member, and he has signed on for market-friendly policies in the past. If the Socialists don't go along, he says, it can only mean that "they want to put Bulgaria in the trash."

Even though Stoyanov is mostly a figurehead, his landslide election last November was read as a referendum against the Socialist government. What has to be put right, he says, searching for a compromise, is "not just a matter of mismanagement" but of "almost criminal, Mafia-like forms of governing the country." Stoyanov admits that if he cannot get the parties together, he will be legally bound to let Interior Minister Dobrev form a government. That could turn the next referendum over to the angry masses on the streets.

--Reported by Massimo Calabresi/Sofia

With reporting by MASSIMO CALABRESI/SOFIA