Demonstrations, violence against foreigners, police patrols - the situation in Bulgaria is heating up, and on the eve of the country's partial accession to the Schengen area, scheduled for the end of March, a wave of misinformation is spreading. This is stated in an analysis by Agence France-Presse from Sofia.
Almost every week the opposition brandishes the same threat: that the Balkan country, the poorest in the EU, will be turned into a "dumping ground for migrants".
In January, Kostadin Kostadinov, leader of the ultra-nationalist pro-Russian Revival party, warned that "we will become the biggest refugee camp in the world."
The issue arose shortly after Austria lifted its veto on Sofia and Bucharest joining the Schengen area for air and sea travel.
In return, Vienna demanded that both countries "immediately return all asylum seekers and refugees for whom they are responsible" but who continued their journey to Austria.
As the gateway to the European Union (EU), Bulgaria has seen a rise in illegal immigration over the past two years, despite a 234-kilometre barbed wire fence along its border with Turkey.
However, it is often only a stopover for migrants, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria and Morocco, on their way to Western Europe.
At the other end of the political spectrum, socialists have also joined the disinformation dance.
After the recent decision to deport people from Germany, they accused the government of turning the country into a "penal colony for criminals, murderers, rapists and money launderers".
In reality, we are talking about several Bulgarians, released after serving their sentences, according to the Bulgarian Ministry of the Interior and the Bavarian authorities. 18 Syrians, including children between the ages of 4 and 6, were also returned to Sofia, but they were never convicted of serious crimes in Germany.
In a message published on Facebook last week, the government denied the existence of "unprecedented migration flows" in Bulgaria, a country that has been relatively spared given the one million asylum applications registered in the EU in 2023, a record for the past 7 years.
According to official figures from the National Agency for Refugees, as of March 11 this year, 190 third-country nationals had been transferred from other EU countries under the Dublin Regulation, which stipulates that migrants must apply for asylum in the European country they first arrive in way.
This figure is comparable to the last two months of 2023 when 127 people returned to Bulgaria.
In addition, reception centres "are only 43% full," according to authorities.
"Bulgarian parties that want to divert our country from its European path are playing with people's fears and instilling hatred by spreading false information," accused the government, which sees behind these "forecasts of chaos" the hand of the Kremlin.
Adding to the anti-immigrant rhetoric, some elected representatives posted out-of-context videos on social media showing "migrants beating up young Bulgarians" on a pedestrian street in Sofia, an incident that police described as a fight between two groups who knew each other.
Representatives of minor parties even went to the airport to meet the planes allegedly carrying "hordes of migrants", posting pictures to support their claims.
Each time, pro-Russian websites picked up the story.
In this poisonous climate, incidents targeting foreigners were recorded in Sofia and near Plovdiv, the country's second-largest city. Demonstrations were also organized with calls for the migrants to be expelled "from Bulgaria".
So much so that the government decided to increase the police presence in the capital and around the refugee centres.
"Words reflect reality," Ildiko Otova, a researcher at Sofia University, told AFP. There is no migration "crisis", but "a crisis narrative that poses a real threat to security". /BGNES
