The Church of TED is very optimistic. Bulgarians are some of the most pessimistic in the world. There are the Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians.

As a rule, governments monitor people.

[It's] difficult to engage people in politics when they believe that what really matters is where they personally stand.

Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments.

Democracy has always been in crisis: democracy is all about practicing the art of bearable dissatisfaction. In democratic societies, people often complain about their leaders and their institutions. The gap between the ideal democracy and the existing one cannot be bridged.

Bulgaria has been deindustrialized by interest groups who extracted state assets like oil states extract the oil in their ground.