Bulgaria’s equality body has ordered the removal of a series of Facebook posts by Revival leader Kostadin Kostadinov targeting his political opponent of Jewish origin, Daniel Lorer of We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria (PP-DB), saying they constitute hate speech against Jews.
In 2022 and 2023, Kostadinov targeted Lorer in a series of Facebook posts. Lorer took his case against Kostadinov to Bulgaria’s equality body, the Commission for Protection against Discrimination, and is being represented by the human rights organisation Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC).
“Freedom of speech does not mean the uncritical and arbitrary use of the wide platform of social networks to discredit opponents by insulting them on a personal level,” the anti-discrimination commission said in its decision.
“Kostadinov has caused the creation of an environment provoking an unpleasant feeling of hostility, rejection and hatred towards Daniel Lorer,” it added.
The final decision was that Kostadinov had committed a violation of the Protection from Discrimination Act by engaging in “harassment” on the grounds of religion, ethnicity, and origin. The decision can be appealed in court.
Kostadin’s Facebook posts, which portrayed Lorer as a reptile and called him a “foreigner”, “foreign agent”, “national traitor”, “anti-human”, “disingenuous creature” who wants “us Bulgarians to be gone and our country to disappear” and others, resulted in Kostadinov’s followers threatening and calling for violence against Lorer on social media, including calls for him to be sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and undisguised regret that “Hitler did not live longer,” the equality body added.
The equality body said a literal reading of Kostadinov’s words showed that they were based on the well-known fact of Lorer’s Jewish origin and did not carry a political message. It stressed the importance of the posts being publicly accessible and available on Kostadinov’s official Facebook page, which has nearly 320,000 followers.
Kostadinov, for his part, defended himself on the grounds of freedom of political expression, claiming that any offensive remarks were a politician’s assessment of a political opponent. He argued before the equality body that he had the right to use these expressions because Bulgaria is a democratic society guided by the principles of tolerance and pluralism, which means that it should tolerate this kind of statement.
Kostadinov also noted that the phrase “this disrespectful creature” is a comment that he says does not put Lorer in an unfavourable discriminatory position because it does not focus on his ethnicity, while the words “blatantly oblivious anti-human” constitute a political assessment of one politician by another.
Revival is the third political force in the Bulgarian parliament, having won 13.4% of the vote in the last parliamentary elections. The party is a very close partner of Germany’s AfD, with which it formed the Sovereignist group in the European Parliament.
The Bulgarian party openly advocates withdrawing the country from NATO and reviewing EU membership.
