Recently I spent two days in Bulgaria, hosted by the British Council and the British Embassy, to launch their New Politician’s Toolkit to Bulgarian political parties and media. The Toolkit arose out of the UK-South East Europe Forum, a project run over the last couple of years and in which I had been one of the participants, which is how I came be invited to launch it.

The UK-South East Europe Forum was an interesting project, bringing together, in different strands, people from the creative industries, or young people, from the region together with some from the UK. The third strand was the one that I was involved with, entitled “people and politics”, and I spent a very interesting time talking with politicians and officials from Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia, about how policy is made and how it can involve both party members and the broader public.

The toolkit arose out of the forum, and is a really excellent guide to being involved in politics - in every area ranging from traditional campaigning, through to how you actually run a political organisation, and how as an individual politician you can ensure that you personally develop. It was written by James Graham of Unlock Democracy (aka the author of Quaequam Blog) - the New Politics Network (Unlock Democracy’s previous incarnation) was the partner in the project and a key part of its success. Certainly some of the contents of the booklet are quite familiar to me, but a lot certainly aren’t and it looks extremely useful, for politicians both in the UK and across the Balkan region.

In talking to active members of Bulgarian political parties and journalists it was very interesting to reflect on some of the similarities and some of the differences between what is expected of politicians in the UK and in Bulgaria.

Fundamentally the political challenge is the same, and there are a lot of campaigning and other techniques which we can learn from each other, many of which are set out in the toolkit. Both in the UK and Bulgaria turnouts in elections are falling. I used as an example one of the key issues which many people may not see as political but which really gets people interested and has a political solution, the collection of rubbish. This certainly gets people going in my street, and I was interested to hear that it is currently also a very live issue in Sofia - I understand that somewhere in a railway siding hundreds of thousands of tonnes of rubbish is currently being stored.

In both places too many people often think of politics as something they observe, without ever really engaging or in sometimes even believing they could. But I was particularly struck by the description which several people used of the public seeing politics in the Bulgaria as “soap opera”. This seems a bit more extreme than the situation in the UK, and it seems that Bulgarian politics is ever more personality-driven than here: clearly the media and all of us are interested in the personalities of our political leaders, but the policies they can implement, and agree with their parties, do also play a very important role.

It was very interesting to talk to exchange ideas on some of these ideas and differences - as well as to see just a little of Sofia. The last time I was there I only ever saw it in the dark or rain, so it was great to enjoy it in the autumn sunshine!

It was also the first time I had been there since they joined the EU: so great to find myself walking through a small park where I realised I had last been about seven years ago, when an international group of us from a seminar spent a morning cheerfully campaigning for Bulgarian EU membership!

In introducing the toolkit I said a few words under the heading “Engaging Voters in the 21st Century” - my speech is here if people are interested to see it.