The Cooperative – the Parties Hope for Successful Economic Modernization of Bulgaria (the end of the XIXth – beginning of the XXth Century)

The restored in 1879 modern Bulgarian state found itself in a difficult economic situation. With its economic backwardness, the political parties in the country were persistently looking for models who could allow them to accelerate and catch up with the other European countries. One of the ideas was to use the cooperative as a tool to catch up with the century's lag. However, the situation in the economic sector was such that practical actions were mainly in the area of “Raiffeisen cash registers” and "popular banks", while other types of cooperatives were practically invisible in real economic exchange. In their documents, all organizations gradually accepted the need for a policy of "patronage", which must be carried out with the mechanisms of state policy, especially through the financial sector and ensuring access to cheap credit from the cooperators. Some parties, especially those from the leftist and populist sector, accepted that the cooperative idea can be useful only with direct political intervention in the sector and even through organizational connection between parties and active cooperatives. This early model of authoritarian impulses was extremely persistent in Bulgarian politics and survived even the entire twentieth century. This leads to a distortion of economic relations and a steady increase in state intervention and control over cooperative networks.