Up to a point, King Simeon

摘要

On the face of things, Bulgaria's voters are a pretty capricious lot. In a general election in June they handed a big victory to their long-exiled ex-king and a party he had founded just 11 weeks earlier, the Simeon II National Movement. Now they have voted out of office a president who was backed both by the ex-king and by the party that ran Bulgaria before June. He had solved a dangerous crisis on taking office in 1997, and had been popular ever since. Instea'd, they have elected Georgi Purva-nov, a member of the former Communist Party whose daft economics produced that crisis four years ago and which got only a fifth of the seats in this summer's election.