Fascism in Bulgaria

rdf:langString Fascism in Bulgaria

rdf:langString The extent of fascism in Bulgaria is contentious. Many authors state that it never became a mass movement, remaining marginal there, and proved considerably less successful than in the neighboring Balkan states. Bulgaria's fascists were not only weak, divided and lacking clear ideology, but their worldview differed significantly from that of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. Thus a consensus has been reached between Bulgarian and international experts that Bulgaria's agrarian society and its monarchic system were the barriers before the fascist practices and establishment of fascist regime in the country, while Bulgaria's political system preserved a relative pluralism. An alternative opinion is that some Bulgarian organizations with considerable membership, activity, and social presence had fully developed fascist ideology by the late 1930s, but they neither came to power, nor participated in the government of the country. In fact, fascist organizations did not take power within the framework of the royal dictatorships, but discourses close to fascism can be found in then Bulgarian governing elite. Although the Bulgarian marxist historiography labelled the period 1935-1944, as "monarcho-fascism", the 1990s saw the end of the dispute with the marxist ideological dogmas, and in 1993 came the end of the theory that Bulgarian fascism is an unquestionable fact. Since then the label “fascism” has been openly challenged by Bulgarian scholars, but this led partially, to an untrue radical belief that fascism never existed in Bulgaria. Regardless of the debates about whether or not there was fascism in Bulgaria, no historian denies the existence of political movements and organizations with ideologies sympathetic to Nazism and fascism. What the local fascists were lacking, was enough totalitarian drive, as well as the figure of a führer, without whom they could not contest the authoritarian regime of Tsar Boris. Boris anyway succeeded to preserve the bourgeois social order, but feared the use of these organizations by Germany, and tried to exert a strong control on them.