Out in the streets

GROWTH is slow and recession looms. The country's attempt to join the European Union's passport-free Schengen area has been slapped down by the Dutch and the Finns, who cite concerns about corruption (see Charlemagne). The fight against organised crime is weakening. Good news is in short supply in Bulgaria. With presidential and local elections due later this month, the last thing that Boyko Borisov, the prime minister, needed was a week of racially charged rioting.

Two weeks ago, Angel Petrov, a 19-year-old, was killed in an apparent hit-and-run incident in the village of Katunitsa. The driver of the car was an associate of Kiril Rashkov, a local Roma (gypsy) bigwig. Tsar Kiro, as he likes to be known, is a wealthy man with no obvious source of income. (He has been accused of running a moonshine operation, but was last charged with a crime back in the communist era.) Enraged villagers began protesting outside Mr Rashkov's palatial residence. Things turned particularly nasty when they were joined by far-right football supporters from nearby Plovdiv, Bulgaria's second city. The demonstrators torched the building, forcing local police to escort Mr Rashkov and his family to safety.

The protests spread to other cities, bringing young people on to the streets chanting slogans against Bulgaria's Roma and Turkish minorities. They died down after Mr Rashkov was arrested (on suspicion of making death threats), but not before over 350 other arrests were made in Bulgaria's worst disturbances for years.

Mr Borisov insists the riots were about criminality, not race. The inhabitants of Katunitsa say that their problem is with Mr Rashkov rather than the Roma in general. “We are powerless and the institutions are not helping us”, says one villager who travelled to the capital, Sofia, to join the demonstration. Other protesters seemed more angered by the culture of impunity around powerful figures like Mr Rashkov than motivated by ethnic hatred.

But Ataka (“Attack”), a far-right party that holds 21 seats in Bulgaria's 240-seat parliament, spied an opportunity. Party members in black T-shirts bearing the slogan “I do not want to live in a gypsy country” distributed anti-Roma pamphlets at demonstrations held under the banner “Gypsy crime—a danger for the country”. Dimitar Bechev, of the Sofia office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, says that “if the boss in question hadn't been Roma it would have caused local outrage, but not become a national issue.”

Tackling corruption and organised crime was Mr Borisov's main promise when he took office in 2009. At first the former policeman, who likes to cultivate a strongman image, oversaw swift progress. A series of televised arrests put a stop to a spate of kidnappings. But local barons such as Mr Rashkov, only some of them Roma, remain in towns and villages across the country.

At a time of economic insecurity, patience in the EU's poorest country is wearing thin. Despite the rigorous fiscal policies of Simeon Djankov, Bulgaria's finance minister, growth forecasts for this year have been cut. The country's woes are exacerbated by those in neighbouring Greece, a vital market for Bulgaria's exports. A third of Bulgaria's banks are Greek-owned.

Mr Borisov hopes that a big road-building programme will bring his party, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, victory in this month's elections. But although Bulgaria needs the infrastructure, opposition parties have been ridiculing the prime minister for cutting ribbons on new stretches of motorway when people are worried about jobs and crime. Volen Siderov, leader of Ataka, is campaigning with a simpler message. “I am your weapon,” he says. “Use it.”