Bulgarians are losing count of the scandals.
There’s a Watergate-style wiretapping scandal. There’s an agricultural tycoon accusing the government of former Prime Minister Boyko Borissov of extortion. And there’s a state-owned bank providing hundreds of millions of euros to a small batch of favored companies.
The country’s dizzying daily headlines feel more like plotlines from a hit mafia series on Netflix than actual events unfolding in a European Union member country ahead of an election on July 11.
The big question is whether this is finally a tipping point that spells a definitive end to the era of Borissov, the former firefighter and bodyguard whose center-right GERB party dominated the Balkan country’s politics for more than a decade but lost power in April. The EU’s poorest nation has a long history of corruption but the sheer scale of the latest revelations of state capture is new. The fresh testimony only reinforces widespread public anger that an octopus
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