Bulgarian Agrarian National Union - History

History

An Agrarian Union was first organized in Bulgaria in 1899 — it was to be a professional organization open only to peasants, and was at first not meant to become a political party. The Union initially won widespread peasant support by mobilizing peasants throughout Bulgaria to peaceful demonstrations against the government’s unfair taxation policies. Throughout this process the Union remained politically unaligned. However, at its third congress, motivated by upcoming elections for the Bulgarian National Assembly, the Union leaders—not peasants themselves but a group of teachers—voted to become a political party. Thus, in 1901, the Agrarian Union became the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union — Bulgaria’s official peasant party. BZNS candidates subsequently ran for positions in local and national elections.

Over the next twenty years, the BZNS remained a part of Bulgarian politics, but it began to falter for lack of a concrete ideological base. Aleksandar Stamboliyski saved the party from that plight by first publishing a series of theoretical articles on the peasants’ role in the state and history, and finally taking control of the BZNS party. In 1909 he wrote the book Political Parties or Estatist Organizations, which laid the foundations for the ideology of the BZNS. Stamboliyski rose through the ranks of the BZNS and by 1918 had become the leader of the party. World War I left Bulgaria in a state of severe social and economic crisis, and after a series of worker and peasant strikes and uprisings between 1918 and 1920, the Bulgarian army and all old political parties were essentially discredited. In 1920, by a combination of major popular support and some coercive methods, Stamboliyski was able to create a BZNS controlled government.

The chief rival of Stamboliyski’s BZNS was the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP). After World War I the BZNS and BKP were the two leading parties in Bulgarian politics. Though the BZNS initially beat the communist party for political power, its authority quickly began to wane because, according to the communists, the BZNS wavered in its support between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Despite the fact that most of them were not rich, peasants still participated in an old bourgeois economic system, which was, from the communist point of view, destined to fail.

Though the BKP was always opposed to certain BZNS policies, most other factions became dissatisfied with Stamboliyski and the BZNS because of growing corruption within the party, and an increasingly oppressive rule over the Bulgarian people. On 9 June 1923 a bloc of military factions staged a coup d'état and deposed the Stamboliyski regime. Though the communists ultimately gained control of the Bulgarian government, the BZNS remained in existence (as a member of the Fatherland Front), and participated in agricultural policy in Bulgaria until the fall of communism in 1989.