So a king is back on his throne—or rather he is more or less in charge of his country without actually having a crown plonked on his head, at any rate not quite yet. That alone, in ex-communist Europe, is a remarkable first. The clear victory of the Simeon II National Movement in Sunday's general election in Bulgaria was an astonishing feat. Within a few months of the outfit's inception, it had swept past the ruling and reform-minded centre-right coalition of Ivan Rostov, dismissed the challenge of the barely reconstructed communists of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, assured just about everybody that it would seek a corruption-fighting consensus, and sailed to victory with no less than 43% of the votes and about half the seats in Bulgaria's parliament.
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