Ivo Bozhkov is the man who brought social networks into the Bulgarian political process. Today quite a few people who first became famous as influencers are entering parliament, but he was the first on that list: in 2015, already popular as a blogger, he was elected to the Sofia Municipal Council, the city’s governing assembly, on preference votes.
During last year’s anti-government protests, his live broadcasts drew hundreds of thousands of views online.
Today he is serving his second term as a municipal councilor in Sofia, and he fell just short of entering the National Assembly, Bulgaria’s parliament. He studied political science in Montreal and did further training in France. He decided to come back to apply what he had learned at home.
What place do social networks have in today’s politics? When do they help the process, and when do they turn toxic? Does artificial intelligence help or harm politics? What kind of people should take up this calling? And why… do you need to start renovating your home so you don’t lose all hope in politics?
– You are my first guest who is a sitting politician. You’re also the person who first started livestreaming the sessions of the Sofia Municipal Council—back then, that kind of transparency seemed downright unbelievable. And today even negotiations to form a government are conducted this way. Do you like that?
– At first there were reactions that it wasn’t okay to expose how negotiations are conducted. For me, though, it’s extremely useful. In the first stage, when the talk was about policies, it was super important to see what the conversation actually looks like. That it isn’t just some people sitting down at a table and handing out this post and that. The same thing happens inside the parties themselves—the conversation is about the platform, about what should be a priority. It’s good for people to see it, so that trust in the process goes up a little.
You could see how the different parties have their own experts. Some sound convincing, others don’t. Some, when one of their claims is challenged, push back with examples, with data, with specifics. And others just speak in generalities.
For me this process is very important and healing.
First, for restoring trust in the process among the voters themselves. And second, for raising the level of the conversation. Because when you know this conversation is being watched by other people, some of whom have expertise, you prepare better. You have to be better so you don’t embarrass yourself.
Of course, the conversation about who will take on the political responsibility, as the song goes, can’t possibly be broadcast.
– Most of us watching, it seems, were struck by how low the level of the conversation was. How vague the talk was, how unprepared the negotiators sounded.
– Exactly! But that’s part of the process—the feedback. Without it there’s no improvement. In the end everyone makes mistakes, anyone may not have the best idea in a given case, but that feedback matters. Even the fact that not all the conversations were up to standard is useful in some way. The conversation about defense, for instance, made an impression on me. There were specialists who talked in generalities and others who mentioned concrete details, indicators, policies. Whereas in culture, say, there was nothing but generalities. “Come on, let’s give 1 percent and do administrative reforms, though we don’t know exactly which ones either.” Even the gaps will make people get a bit of a fright—at least that’s what I believe. There’s no other way.
– Well, yes, there’s simply nowhere for other experts to come from. A few more years of elections three times a year and everyone will have passed through parliament.
You said transparency is part of the healing process. Hardly anyone would dispute that we badly need healing and a dramatic rise in the level at which politics happens in this country. What else does that process include, in your view?
– First, this conversation has to be visible, because the participants are more careful: it’s watched, recorded, it leaves a trace. The second thing, which I’ve noticed at Sofia Municipality too since I came in in 2015, is
establishing digitalization as a way of functioning.
In the council’s previous term, from 2015 to 2019, the only meaningful thing that happened, in my opinion, was the initiative “Vision for Sofia.” One unit of the municipality—Sofiaplan, the city’s urban planning agency—had the task of gathering as large a database as possible about the city’s layout, of knowing how it would be updated, and gradually
of having that data begin to provide real-time information about the fabric of how the city functions.
To make the right decisions in the modern world, you need access to information. Technology gives us the chance to have that information almost in real time, to make the best decisions based on that constant connection. Sofiaplan was working in that direction.
– And then it all went into the “round folder,” the wastebasket, as became clear from what the head of Sofiaplan said when he announced he was leaving.
– Yes. Unfortunately, what is still changing very slowly is
the administration’s unwillingness to give up its power to control information.
Because when you have the number of building permits, the floor areas, statistics on young people settling in a given neighborhood, you get a real picture, and power can be held accountable. Anyone can see, for example, what need for a kindergarten will arise in that neighborhood in a few years.
Right now, the head of the department responsible for that data has the power—by managing the process and knowing the elements of its database—to redirect, to control, and sometimes to commit irregularities. I’ve heard, although I can’t prove it, that a place in a kindergarten can be found for a child with a slip of paper bearing the child’s EGN, Bulgaria’s personal identification number, handed to the head of that department.
– Oh, yes, we’ve all heard and seen that however transparent the system supposedly is, by old tradition there are always ways to get around the rules. As a parent, I really can’t understand how a problem like kindergartens can stay completely unsolved for so many years. I think it’s simply a convenient topic for diverting attention.
– The kindergarten system has been automated, and yet every year the admissions run into problems. And in my view that problem comes from the fact that the system isn’t open, so that people who understand data and process management could help make it transparent, free of interference, and working properly.
The process of change has to keep going in that direction. Every year, Sofia Municipality’s budget is handed to us as a scanned PDF. It’s a telling example: those in power say they’re presenting it to us digitized, but it has absolutely no value, because that PDF is unusable.
A scanned PDF is not digitalization!
When asked why it isn’t given to us as spreadsheets, the answer is that a malicious person could change the numbers in the spreadsheet and produce fake news.
– And it’s clear the goal is simply to hide the data.
– It’s the same ordeal every year—it takes an insane amount of time for something elementary to happen, something that would help everyone be more productive. Only then it wouldn’t be just the deputy mayor for finance who could make sensible proposals for changes to the budget, but every one of the municipal councilors, because it wouldn’t take them a week to type those numbers in all over again.
For me, the process of digitalization creates a real opportunity for influence at many more levels. Which, however, takes away from the exclusivity that power currently holds by not allowing quick intervention in the processes.
– How do you keep from despairing in this environment?
– The truth is, I’m in utter despair. It took me five years to get it written into the official documents of the Sofia Municipal Council that its sessions are broadcast live on social networks, that the documents we vote on are visible before they’re voted on, not after. That we can submit proposals with an electronic signature.
It took me five years to get something that could literally be set up as a process in a month!
It really does make me despair, and it demotivates me.
That’s why, alongside my public work, I take on other tasks that remind me of the need to set a goal, achieve it within some reasonable time frame, and feel satisfied with that. For example, I started renovating my home and replaced the electrical system myself.
The way it ought to happen with a policy, the way a politician ought to be able to work. There’s a problem—your wiring is old. So what do you do? You start searching websites, consulting specialists: there are grounded cables, what are the modern safety standards. Then you look for the best cables, even if they’re a bit more expensive. In the end you draw up a plan for renewing the wiring, and you do it.
In this case I did it myself, but every bill in parliament or proposal in the municipal council ought to happen this way. When you have a problem, you consult specialists, you weigh up the best solution, you propose it, and it goes through discussion. That’s something that doesn’t happen in the municipal council, so I try to make up for it in my personal life.
– I was hoping for a little more optimism…
– For at least another two years, there’s no way I can be optimistic. The reality right now is that even if I make a proposal that’s good, large-scale, something that could change the environment, it won’t be accepted, because it doesn’t come from the ruling majority. If it’s genuinely good, it will be stolen in some sense by the ruling majority, reformatted and adopted. That’s great—I don’t need my name to be on it somewhere, so, after all, the pessimism isn’t all that great either.
In two years, as we’ve seen at the national level, there won’t be a single winning player ruling alone who can do whatever he pleases. Then running the city will depend on more people, more political groups, which will lead to a structure that allows good proposals to get through. Right now that’s impossible.
– The most banal question you can ask a political scientist, but for me it’s very important and interesting. Do left and right still exist in our time?
– In principle they do, but my honest answer is that… they don’t. I see absolutely no difference between the political representatives in, for example, the Sofia Municipal Council. Proposals get passed that squander insane amounts of money on nonsense, which can’t possibly be a right-wing measure, and yet supposedly a right-wing party is in charge. Optimizing spending, caring for public resources so that as little as possible is spent—that’s what the right is. The current rulers are supposedly right-wing, but that’s complete nonsense, it’s a joke.
– But in a sense that’s true on a global scale as well.
– Over time I’ve identified myself as being on the right. But there are so many things I’ve seen from people with a right-wing label that I want nothing to do with. I see how personal and party interest—not as ideology, but as pure party positioning—take the lead.
One district mayor in Sofia proposed that 5 to 10 percent of the budget be decided by the residents of the district—that they vote on which priority should be tackled first in their district, whether a new playground or paving the street. I think that’s great, because it gets residents to see their surroundings as something they themselves can change, and it creates a line of communication with those in power. And the authorities, in turn, take into account the real needs of the residents.
I was told I was a leftie for supporting it. If that’s being a leftie, then yes, apparently I’ve become a leftie.
But I no longer believe in those labels.
Because at the global, the national, and now the local level, reality shows that what matters most is that power takes citizens into account and that they have control over how the money is spent and a way to give feedback. That’s what we should strive for. I don’t know if it’s left or right; rather, I believe it’s a process that will restore trust in governance, which is in deep crisis both globally and locally.
People don’t trust the politicians in power. And that lack of trust leads to nothing good. It has to be overcome.
– What kind of people do you think should become politicians?
– People who want to do something good so that they can feel satisfied that they’ve contributed to the common good. It sounds like a cliché, but there are people—I know some—who have that inner need to feel useful to the citizens.
Everyone has a calling, a talent: for some it’s building their own business, others are successful professionals. Still others have those two needs plus one more—besides building their personal and professional success, to extend it to a wider level. In Bulgaria, if you’re successful on your own in your little fortress, sooner or later, if you don’t help the people outside that fortress, you’ll suffer for it.
European politics as a whole has realized this too. If one country in Europe is successful and super rich while its neighbors are poor and miserable, sooner or later it comes to conflict, and that prosperity ends.
I believe the people who grasp this reality on a personal and a national level are the ones who should go into politics.
Also, you have to be honest. So that no one can say to you, “That’s not fair, what you’re doing isn’t okay,” because we’re already at that basic level of motivation. They need to be people who want to build principles so that things are the same for everyone—for me just as for everyone else.
– And that’s leftism, I’m telling you as a leftie.
You were the first in Bulgaria to recognize social networks as media. Isn’t it a problem that today they’re so politically important? Isn’t it rather a negative trend, given all the problems they’ve created?
– In the beginning, for me the internet and social networks were a panacea for the country’s problems. And to some extent they really were. I had the chance to reach a huge number of people without the traditional media, which couldn’t have happened otherwise.
But today we really are going through an unpleasant period. A kind of nihilism that this communication is turning into, because people see how, by taking absurd positions, they become significant. They become popular and can afford to vilify anyone at all—a person with authority, with expertise, with professionalism.
In fact, what the traditional media provided has been lost.
Reliability of information, some kind of standard. You can’t just say anything, just like that. And this drift toward extremes on social networks is a huge problem.
That’s why I’m also glad the traditional media didn’t die out—they kept their importance.
– I don’t think that’s so at all. Their role has shrunk terribly, newspapers are no longer a factor, television is losing ground. What’s left are online media, which for the most part are at an appalling level, especially here.
– That’s true, but the traditional television channels still remain one of the important factors, fundamental to the public process. That’s where public debate largely takes place, even though social networks are taking it over too. We saw how one ill-judged selfie can produce a huge reaction. But in Bulgaria the traditional media remain enormously significant, for better or worse—and maybe it isn’t all that bad.
What matters, after all, is to find some mechanisms to overcome state interference in those media; then, in my opinion, things will balance out.
– And how do you think media can be funded today?
– Yes, that’s a big challenge. There are few rich people who can afford to own a media outlet without meddling in it in a way that redirects public debate in a disgusting manner.
Because every media outlet is power and influence. But it can be put to use.
– On the whole, the model of someone simply funding them can’t give media a purpose; it’s toxic and kills them one way or another.
– The process, for Bulgaria specifically, is a bit easier, because the whole advertising market is held by a few players. The environment is extremely tough, because we’re few consumers, a small market. But it’s also completely unrealistic to have such a disproportion in advertising revenue. It can’t be that, for example, Eurocom, a small Bulgarian television channel, has a market share of 1/100 and an advertising share of 1/1,000. That disproportion is illogical, and it exists only because of the players in the advertising market who distort it.
Here things can change through state, institutional intervention. There you go, leftism again. But that’s a joke—enforcing the laws of competition, making it impossible for one participant to set the whole game, is a process that’s mandatory. The Commission for Protection of Competition is one of those institutions that, if revamped with a real function, could break up the advertising market so that players with real value can establish themselves.
As we said at the start, it’s all a matter of holding power, whether in data, in politics, or in advertising.
– I once published a provocative piece—which sounds even more exotic against the backdrop of scanned PDFs—arguing that politics is actually a very suitable field for artificial intelligence. How does a direction like that sound to you for the distant future?
– Interesting! Artificial intelligence is an extremely interesting field, and it doesn’t cancel out political participation. In my view, politicians ought to put forward ideas for policies. One says he wants to turn the Perlovska, a small river running through Sofia, into a real river, and that’s his project for the city. But how that can be done—the best solution can be provided by artificial intelligence. Likewise, another politician might say his project is for Sofia to develop to the north rather than the south.
If these two projects clash politically and people vote for one of them, the best way to carry it out can be assisted by AI. To cut costs and arrive at the optimal approach. AI is the tool that can impartially help politicians achieve their political goals.
– But that applies to a wonderful world in which we vote for approaches, ideas, proposals, and not because we find someone likable.
– The good and the bad thing about politics is that these two things always happen together, and they’ll go on doing so, at least in the coming years. We see that people vote very little for ideas and much more for who they like, who sounds good, even though an entirely different reality may exist behind that.
The problem is also when technology is used to position yourself so that you’re liked. Governing society increasingly happens on the basis of information gathered from social networks and elsewhere. And here the boundary is very interesting: how governments will actually be able to use this information to manage processes, rather than to maintain their image.
These two things aren’t always connected. And here the question is once again about the people doing this work. Their motives should not be to siphon off resources or to hand back “change”—kickbacks—to their sponsors, but to be elected to public office with the aim of doing what they were elected for.
