The Prime Minister should be Hristo Ivanov, I have not asked him and I hope I am not doing him a disservice

• The change of model may be for the worse, says the media expert
• I am one of those who not only realizes that the Russian propaganda is too strong in our country, but that it has already brainwashed hundreds of thousands
• In three scenes I continue to perform my role with the greatest gratitude to the heavenly dramatist – childhood, love and the text

– Mr. Lozanov, who or what should be the next Prime Minister of Bulgaria? This question still has no answer and logically continues to be among the most discussed.

– When I say who, it will become clear what I think it should be, because I have a specific proposal. I hope I won’t do him a “disservice”, because I didn’t ask him, but politicians are public figures and should be discussed – both critically and positively.

I think that the next Prime Minister should be the leader of “Yes, Bulgaria” Hristo Ivanov. Because he in the parliament now most fully expresses and maintains the historical continuity of the will for democratic changes in our society: from his action in Rosenets, which raised the protest wave of 2020, back through the decisive political and geopolitical reforms during the time of Kostov and Stoyanov, and until the big blue rally on Orlov Most in 1990. Along with this, Hristo Ivanov was the first to make a well-measured dialogical step towards GERB/SDS in search of interaction without consent. Moreover, he is an adamant advocate of judicial reform, which precisely outlines the boundary of permissible and impermissible compromise in the negotiations between the former in the National Assembly.

In fact, he would have been elected last time, if the president had not given the third mandate to the BSP, so that Russian interests would not be affected by the “warmongers”.

– What is your prediction for the current parliament? It has become fashionable to describe a possible government of GERB and PP as a marriage of convenience, but is such a metaphor for life appropriate? And is such a merger the only possible option?

– It is probably not the only possible option, but for the moment it is the most acceptable. Because during the political intermission in which Bulgaria, a member of the EU and NATO, has been residing for years, the pro-Putin forces and attitudes are constantly gaining strength. And the long-awaited change in the management model may take place, but not for the better, but for the worse.

It is true that DB and PP go from parliament to parliament with a request to sanction GERB for the corrupt practices allowed during its administration, but

the voters did not give them such a mandate for the fifth time

Unfortunately, the fight against corruption did not prove to be a sufficient mobilizing factor. Once, because it seems to the ordinary citizen that she was previously lost in the transition. The second time, because it seems to him that this is an argument in the upper echelons of power that does not concern him personally. And a third time, because it happened to him personally on the road or at the counter to participate in corrupt practices, so he takes their condemnation subconsciously to himself. And it is unlikely that the sixth election campaign in a row will change his opinion. The trend is rather the opposite – anti-GERD talk generates less and less votes. Apparently, the fight against corruption in politics in our country can only be fought side by side with those you suspect are dependent on it. A delicate task that requires skills exactly the opposite of arresting Boyko Borisov without finding sufficient legal grounds.

– The attitude of the political parties towards the war in Ukraine continues to be a cornerstone in the negotiations for government, management, elections. To what extent can it influence the formation of a government in our country?

– It must have an impact, because otherwise, in the next elections, there is a growing danger that a pro-Putin government will come to power – at first shy, and then frankly – pro-Putin. I don’t know when the president will not hold out and hand over a mandate for its composition to “Vazrazhdane” in continuation of his own persistent insistence on Bulgaria’s neutrality in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Adding to this the risk that due to power ambitions and personal pet peeves parties, which for now declare belonging to the Euro-Atlantic majority, will withdraw from it, it becomes clear that Putin, instead of Ukraine, can win the war in Bulgaria without having fought it .

– You wished for your birthday, which you celebrated on April 26, that the war in Ukraine would end. Are you afraid of this war? And why? Despite the political talk about weapons and help from our side, people seem to continue to perceive it as something distant – it is not in our country, it does not set our houses on fire. Or is it the fault of Russian propaganda, which according to some is too strong in our country, for this feeling?

– I am one of those who not only realize that Russian propaganda is too strong in our country, but that it has already brainwashed hundreds of thousands. Its purpose, like any propaganda, is to tell black and white with conspiracy theories that Ukrainians are not victims of Russian aggression, but the opposite. By the same logic, the number of people convinced that the Earth is flat is increasing.

So that

the war really scares me with the damage it inflicts on common sense, but not in Ukraine, but in Bulgaria

Part of them is the gleeful hand-wringing that people are dying in a neighboring country, not in your own. My death, wherever you are on the planet, cannot help but darken your joy in life if you have retained your normal human sensitivity. And propaganda has not turned you into a mental Russian subject.

– Recently, many of the cultural events in our country have become political – the scandal in the National Theater, the protest against the participation of the Putin-supporting pianist Valentina Lisitsa, the anger against the director Teodor Ushev because of the presence of his film in the film festival in Moscow, the dissatisfaction that Georgi Gospodinov allowed his novel “Time Asylum” to be translated into Russian… Why is this happening?

– Because we returned to 1989, when everything was just politics. And we returned there because it turned out that the repressive Soviet regime far from fell with the fall of the Berlin Wall, as we naively thought at the time. He has only been gathering resources to plunge back into a cold and now hot war with the West over territorial redistribution. And we are among the first to want it back.

So the politicization of our society today is inevitable but it should not be blind to see the real faces of threat and salvation to the nation. This also has a direct bearing on the evaluation of each of the cultural facts you mention.

– Your childhood passes in another system – in anticipation of the bright socialist future, when every thought, cultural phenomenon or any event is described euphemistically. What were political conversations like back then, did adults discuss politics as passionately as they do today? Can the past teach us anything now?

– The conversations were almost the same, but the democratic consensus was much broader – all normal people dreamed of getting out of the “Russian peace” and joining the Western world. Indeed, in the public environment, they more or less had to “pretend to be crazy” in order not to become a victim of repression, but as soon as they returned home, they threw off their masks and subjected to ridicule and anger the ideological fabrications and party wildness. They understood very well that all this was propaganda, and Russian propaganda at that, and they were not ready to give in to it even a percentage.

They read only the last page of the “Labour Affairs” newspaper with the weather forecast and the TV program,

because they knew that the trolls of the time were waiting for the others. We can only learn from the ordinary Bulgarian in the recent past what immune protection against brainwashing means and wish it to the Bulgarians of today.

– You are planning a photography exhibition to mark your 65th anniversary. What will she be?

– My intention is to include 65 significant examples of Bulgarian photography created in the last 65 years. I do not presume to determine their significance myself, although I have been engaged in photographic criticism since the 1980s, and I have also invited a curator with his own view. My friendly sentiments towards photographers will inevitably have an influence on me, but I have had the privilege over the years to befriend the most talented of them. I believe that the exhibition, if we are alive and well, will confirm it.

– Does photography even exist today as an art, given that everyone is a photographer with their phone? Who are today’s Lotte Mihailova, Ivo Hadjimishev, Deyana Stamatova?

– We have great photographers of all generations, but the untried viewer hardly knows it, and the purpose of the exhibition is precisely to show him. I imagine he will be surprised to find that there is no cultural threshold between the analog and digital eras of photography. When next to the works of the names you mention, those of Dimitar Dilkov, Stoyan Nenov, Pavel Chervenkov, Boris Misirkov, Georgi Bogdanov, and even younger ones, it will become clear that the photographers have always done the same thing: they looked into things until they manifest their invisible essence.

In my childhood, there was a camera in every home – this was the first “boom” of amateur photography, and even then it was assumed that it could make professional photography redundant. Quite the opposite happened – the more people learned to take pictures, the more their senses of good photography sharpened and they realized that it was beyond their power to make it.

Now the situation is similar, only

the camera is no longer in every home, but in every pocket

The prophecy from the time of the Bauhaus is coming true that the illiterate of the future will be the one who cannot take pictures, because more and more information passes through visual communication, especially in social networks. However, I want to dispel another suspicion – that images threaten words. Let us not forget that we think in words, including the images themselves. Each photo is a told story, only “zipped”.

– You seem to have created a tradition of turning your anniversaries into a cultural event, a celebration of the spirit. Why do you do it?

– I know… Probably because on anniversaries people pay special attention to you and you want to return the same by doing something you feel best at. For me, it’s reading lectures and opening exhibitions. On my 60th birthday, I gave a public lecture on earthly happiness, and on my 50th birthday, I opened an exhibition of works by 50 of my visual artist friends.

– What is the meaning of longevity, does one deserve to take stock of the years, as the cliché says? What is your balance sheet?

– The question of the meaning of longevity is like the question of the meaning of life – there is no general answer, but you give it a little every day with your actions. Looking back, I see three scenes on which I have performed and continue to perform my role with the greatest gratitude to the heavenly dramatist – childhood, love and text.

CV

He was born on April 26, 1958 in Sofia in the family of architects Lozan Lozanov and Olga Staneva

Graduated from “Philosophy” at Sofia University

He worked in the magazine “Bulgarian Photo”, was the editor and deputy editor-in-chief of the magazine “Kultura” and the editor-in-chief of the magazine “Egoist”

Docent at the Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication of Sofia University

He was a member of NSRT (the predecessor of CEM), as well as a member and chairman of CEM

He currently heads the “Science, Culture and Education” Directorate at BTA