Regime Falls as Ex-Communists Quit in Bulgaria

BUDAPEST, Hungary —  Bulgarian Prime Minister Andrei Lukanov and his government of former Communists resigned Thursday, caving in to unrelenting pressure from opposition forces who have refused since June to accept the outcome of free elections.

The Sofia leadership’s collapse marks what could be a dangerous turn of events in Eastern Europe, where strident intellectual minorities have been thwarting efforts by those elected to reform the region’s disaster-stricken economies.

The Bulgarian Socialist Party, which until April was known as the Communist Party, won 211 of 400 seats in Parliament and the right to name a government after the vote, which was conducted nearly six months ago and which foreign monitors deemed fair. Bulgaria’s ex-Communists were the only ones in Eastern Europe to emerge victorious in the region’s first competitive elections since World War II.

But the opposition Union of Democratic Forces, which commands majority support in the Bulgarian capital, repeatedly challenged Lukanov and his Socialists in protest of the outcome. Strikes, street demonstrations and opposition refusal to join in a coalition government have stalled all moves toward arresting Bulgaria’s economic slide.

Industrial production has been tumbling in Bulgaria, where store shelves are barren, basic foods are rationed and electricity cuts plunge city dwellers into cold and darkness for two hours out of every four.

Lukanov announced his resignation in a statement issued by the official BTA news agency in Sofia, indicating that he was fed up with the political fighting that has been at the expense of Bulgarians’ welfare.

The 52-year-old leader blamed the opposition for making it impossible to implement reforms.

“For me, it is therefore pointless to remain at the prime minister’s post, and, in keeping with the statement made in Parliament, I resign my office,” BTA quoted Lukanov as saying.

No successor was named immediately, although news agencies in Sofia reported that a nonpartisan leader would be appointed to oversee a caretaker government until new elections can be held, likely in March.

Lukanov’s resignation had been demanded by strikers and demonstrators since the Socialist election victory. A nationwide general strike this week escalated to include hundreds of thousands of workers, paralyzing the nation and persuading the government to throw in the towel.

After Lukanov’s announcement, the independent trade union Podkrepa and Bulgaria’s Confederation of Independent Trade Unions immediately called off a general strike.

Organizers of that strike, which began Monday, had claimed that by Thursday, 1.3 million workers had walked off the jobs across the nation of 9 million.

But noisy street protests in Sofia had heightened the crisis atmosphere, as anti-government activists halted traffic by barricading major streets with overturned trash cans, park benches and other debris.

Podkrepa and the trade unions condemned the disruptive demonstrations, and Sofia Mayor Alexander Karakachanov, an opposition supporter, threatened to use force to clear the roadblocks.

Opposition activists celebrated the downfall of Lukanov and the Socialist government, chanting “Red rubbish!” and flashing the V-sign.

But there is a chance that the predominantly agrarian majority that voted the Socialists into power could react with similarly disruptive tactics when word of the opposition’s success spreads across the backward, impoverished country.

Lukanov had vowed less than a week ago that he would not be heckled into quitting by a belligerent minority.

“This shouldn’t be a dramatic event, because European governments resign from time to time. But a lot of people are disappointed that this government has been repressed by outside forces, by this pressure from the streets,” Rumen Gechev, a leading Bulgarian economist, told The Times by telephone from Sofia. “The mechanism for bringing down this government was not democratic.”

But Gechev, who voted for the Socialists in June and initially served as a government adviser on economic reform, said those who voted for the Socialists have always conducted themselves peacefully and he had no reason to doubt they would continue to do so.

Another potentially destabilizing factor is the absence of an obvious figure to take the helm, now that the Socialists have been forced out.

Bulgarian President Zhelyu Zhelev, who led the opposition challenge until agreeing in September to serve as head of state, is a respected intellectual but too closely associated with the anti-Socialist movement to serve as a unifying figure.

However, the president served as mediator during Thursday’s emergency negotiations between the Socialists and the UDF, when Lukanov agreed to step down on condition that a nonpartisan figure be named as interim leader.

“The new government should neither be dominated by the BSP or the UDF,” Socialist Party president Alexander Lilov told reporters in Sofia. “The prime minister should be a neutral personality.”

Lukanov last week survived a no-confidence vote in Parliament and won endorsement for his austerity program after opposition legislators walked out.

The UDF deputies had attempted to take advantage of a reported split within the majority party, which is said--primarily by opposition leaders--to be divided into pro-reform and hard-line camps. But the Socialist members of Parliament voted as a bloc to support the prime minister, deflecting the opposition attempt to force the government to resign. The UDF lawmakers then announced that they were temporarily pulling out of the assembly.

Some Western diplomats contend that Bulgarian public opinion has shifted away from support for the Socialists to the opposition parties within the UDF. But no reliable polls are available, so only a referendum or new elections would make clear how much voter sympathies may have changed.

The Socialists have been under fire for failure to improve living conditions, now worse than at any time in the postwar era. Opposition critics have repeatedly pointed out that it was the Socialists’ predecessors, the Bulgarian Communist Party, that created the economic crisis by blindly following Moscow’s bankrupt central planning models.

Some fear that it is already too late to stave off an economic collapse.

Bulgaria suspended all principal and interest payments on its $11-billion foreign debt in March, which has effectively cut the country off from important trade credits.

Neighboring Romania is suffering from a similar wave of anti-government actions staged by the liberal intelligentsia. The opposition there is even smaller, as the populist National Salvation Front won two-thirds of the seats in Parliament in May elections. But calls for a second revolution have been mounting, along with strikes and marches to denounce the government for widespread shortages and hardships.

Hungary is also suffering a slow transition out of economic chaos due to continual bickering between a fragile governing coalition and a strong opposition. Transport drivers staged an illegal blockade a month ago to protest rising fuel costs. That action was suspended when the government temporarily rolled back gasoline prices, but a compromise bill remains bogged down in Parliament while another public confrontation has been brewing.