Bulgaria has the largest Muslim population of Turkish descent outside of Turkiye and yet the Turkish minority in the country views their representation in the Balkan country’s politics as insufficient. They are also more vocal in their demand for equal opportunities in state jobs, ahead of general elections scheduled for Apr. 2.

The country will hold its fifth general election in the past two years amid political unstability, and the Turkish minority finds itself the target of both far-right and left-wing parties.

Associate professor Şabanali Ahmed, a former lawmaker from Bulgaria’s Kardzali (Kırcaali) and an academic at Balkan Research Institute of Trakya University in Türkiye, said Muslim Turks do not have access to equal employment opportunities, and neither are they represented fully in the parliament. Ahmed told Anadolu Agency (AA) that Turks were barely assigned top public sector jobs except for a few administrative appointments in law enforcement and judiciary.

"It violates the constitution’s principle of equality, and is a sign of ghettoization in a country that has been a democracy for the past 33 years," he maintained.

Ahmed said Turks had multiple demands, from religious freedoms to job equality, and they were able to voice their demands only after 1989, through the political parties they founded. Among them is Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) party which currently holds 36 seats in the parliament.

Bulgaria's Turkish minority party is eyeing a power-sharing agreement with the government ahead of the April elections, said the head of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) party.

Mustafa Karadayı, the chairperson of the MRF, whose majority members are Turks and Muslims, is expected to be among the bigwigs in parliament. Karadayı was previously nominated to run for president and came third in the first round with 11.5% of the votes.

In the parliamentary elections, nearly 12,000 voting centers will be set up in the country, and Bulgarian citizens living abroad, including in Türkiye, will be able to vote at 775 centers.

"We need the support of our citizens. Because if we become partners in power, the regions we live in will be much better living spaces. Our citizens will have jobs in both Türkiye and Bulgaria. We call on the citizens of Bulgaria, our compatriots and our brothers, wherever they are in the four corners of the world, primarily our relatives and brothers living in Türkiye, to participate intensively in the elections, to support us," Karadayı told AA earlier this week.

According to Karadayı, MRF will meet voters in Bulgaria, and will also organize Iftar programs in Türkiye's Istanbul and Bursa where Bulgarian Turks have a significant presence.

One of the poorest and least stable members of the EU, Bulgaria is facing a political dead-end as politicians failed to form a government after four elections in a row. Bulgarians headed to the polls last October for a fourth time in the last two years to elect parliament members. The seven parties that won seats, among a total of 240 parliament seats, could not set aside their differences and form a coalition government. So, the voters will have to go to the polls for the fifth time over the past two years. Over 6.6 million citizens are registered to vote at 13,200 polling stations in Bulgaria and 750 centers in 67 other countries. Türkiye, home to many dual Bulgarian nationals, has about 60 polling stations for April's vote.

Şabanali Ahmed said the Turkish community also had "a Mufti problem" when Fikri Salih Efendi, selected by the community, was not recognized by the government. After years of legal battle, the community had their right to choose their own religious leader reinstated, but it required several lawsuits to have their Mufti recognized by the government.

Ahmed added that despite the Turkish community clinging to power through the MRF, the rise of the far-right Attack Party (ATAKA) in the opposition, paved way for policies "which does not grant rights to Turks and other minorities in the country," he added.

"You cannot underestimate ATAKA as simply a party drawing votes from a fringe minority. Their rhetoric garners support from different strata of society. We see women wearing headscarves suffering from insults or assaults in different parts of Bulgaria, because of far-right political discourse feeding it (the hatred)," he said. He also reminded of an attack by the party’s supporters and lawmakers on Banya Bashi Mosque of the Turkish community in Sofia in 2011 under the pretext of "protesting" against loudspeakers used for the recitation of Muslim prayers that allegedly disturbed the vicinity.

Other parties have not been very different, singling out former PM Boyko Borisov’s Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB) which "ignores Turkish presence in Bulgaria and lumps it with other communities as ‘Muslims in Bulgaria'," he said, adding that the Socialist Party has also been "as racist as other parties" towards the Turkish community.

"The Turkish community has been under pressure since the Ottoman sovereignty ended in Bulgaria in 1908. The hostility only changes intensity as per the regime of the era. After the Communist Party came to power, and especially in the 1950s, hostilities and persecution increased," he highlighted.

Under dictator Todor Zhivkov, who ruled the country from 1954 to 1989, an assimilation campaign against the Turkish minority in the country sought to curb their rights under the pretext of creating a homogeneous country. It started in 1984 with orders for Turks to change their Turkish-sounding names to Bulgarian ones and continued with a ban on speaking Turkish in public.

It was not merely limited to language and soon, mosques of the Turkish minority were closed by the communist dictatorship pursuing what it called a "Process of Revival." The community resisted through peaceful protests but increasing restrictions on their daily lives forced them to leave for neighboring Türkiye where they were embraced by the government.

On May 20, 1989, protests in Turkish villages faced crackdowns and increasing violence at the hands of the Bulgarian regime that forced many to flee towards the border. This was what the regime sought, and when the borders were opened, thousands left for Türkiye. Today, a large number of community members are scattered all across the country, particularly in western cities and Istanbul where they reside in housing complexes specifically built by the the Turkish government for the victims.

Some 350,000 people came to Türkiye. It was the largest migration of people in Europe after World War II.

Şabanali Ahmed concluded that despite mass migration, Turks remain a large community in Bulgaria that can affect the outcome of elections.