COVID-19 in Bulgaria: Moral Economy as Pandemic Relief

In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak in early spring 2020, the Bulgarian economy shed a record 120,000 jobs in just six weeks. The unemployed stormed the offices of the National Employment Agency, overburdening its underprotected employees. While other affected countries rolled out variants of basic income or debt freezing, the Bulgarian government elided labor-friendly economic measures by maligning them as “populism.”1 Relying on little to no savings, the newly unemployed coped with the rapidly contracting labor markets and unresponsive welfare state in observable ways. With a faltering formal economy, a moral economy enmeshing people in dependencies on kin and friends kicked in to provide “firebreaks” to rapidly deteriorating living standards. This article focuses on these dynamics and asks what possibilities for progressive social change inhere in the moral economy.