A withheld vote

The polling stations open on time. The machines work. In Sofia's Hristo Botev district, eight people voted in April for every one who comes through the door today. In Fakulteta, fewer than one in five return. In Bukovlak, a DPS stronghold six months ago, the same.

This was 25 October, the first round of Bulgaria's presidential election. In the 169 polling stations with a Roma majority that the Roma for Democracy Foundation tracks, turnout was 8.5 per cent: little more than a third of the national rate, down from 42 per cent of it in the 2021 runoff. About 26,000 people who voted in those stations in April stayed home. Some 11,300 came.

In April I wrote that Roma had broken the vote machine in Bulgaria: the brokers and the pressure ran at full capacity and still lost. October shows what comes after the machine breaks. Not a captive vote. Not an indifferent one. A withheld one.

Neither bought nor herded

Bulgarian politics has two words for the Roma vote: "bought" and "herded". The first round tested both. Nobody delivered it. Three in four of the governing party's April voters in these stations did not back its candidate, Iliyana Yotova. Rumen Radev's 2021 coalition, which took just over 70 per cent here, kept 28 per cent of its voters for his former vice-president. Andrey Gyurov drew Roma voters his camp never had, and lost ground the more Roma the station. A herd does not scatter like this. A bloc does not split three ways and then go home.

Nor did it turn to the far right. Vazrazhdane won 1,256 votes in these stations in April; its leader, Kostadin Kostadinov, won 1,367 in October. The far right did not grow. Its share quadrupled only because everyone else stayed home. The candidate who stood out was Radostin Vasilev, an outsider who organised on the ground: he came first in 49 stations. Kostadinov came first in none.

Call it what it is. This is not apathy. It is a vote on strike.

The price of a strike

A strike is not an absence. It is a price announced in public. And the price here is not paid in cash. It is paid in power.

Bulgaria's parties believe they lose nothing when Roma stay home, because a party counts the votes it gets, not the ones that never appear. The arithmetic runs the other way. Yotova and Gyurov finished 42,719 votes apart. The vote withheld in these 169 majority-Roma stations alone is more than half that margin. Across the country it is larger. In a race this close, the vote no one courted is the vote that decides.

The state pays as well. In whole neighbourhoods the electoral system now reaches fewer than one citizen in ten. On April's paper ballots it threw out one vote in fourteen in stations where nearly every voter is Roma. A state that reaches a tenth of its citizens does not govern them. It administers them.

Three questions for both finalists

Nor is the office on Sunday's ballot ceremonial where it touches this vote. Bulgaria's president appoints four of the twelve Constitutional Court judges. When parliament cannot form a government, as has happened again and again, the president names the caretaker cabinet that runs the next election and the interior ministry, whose police have stood at polling stations in Roma neighbourhoods. Whoever wins on 1 November will hold the instruments that decide how this vote is treated the next time it is cast.

Neither finalist has said a word to it. We found no Roma-specific commitment from Yotova or from Gyurov. Roma for Democracy endorses neither. So here is the price, the same for both, in three questions a candidate can answer in one sentence. Will the caretaker governments you appoint keep police out of polling stations in Roma neighbourhoods? Will your interior ministry staff and equip those stations like any other in the country? Will you come to Hristo Botev and Fakulteta and ask for this vote in person? We will publish the answers. We will publish the silences too.

Set the price and collect it

The task for Roma leaders is not to deliver this vote. That was the brokers' business, and April ended it. The task is to set its price and collect it. Withholding set the price. Only turning out collects it. If the vote stays home again on Sunday, both camps learn it can be ignored at no cost. If it turns out, the winner owes part of the margin to it, and a debt owed in public can be called in.

The vote is in Hristo Botev. It is in Fakulteta, in Bukovlak, in Montana. It was not lost on 25 October. It was withheld.

It will not be given away again.