Mirolsav Ivanov of the Bulgarian National Union – New Democracy Party was condemned by the Bulgarian Jewish umbrella group Shalom for spreading antisemitic propaganda. Ultra-nationalist Bulgarian politician Miroslav Ivanov was condemned by Shalom, a Jewish umbrella organization in Bulgaria, for a television interview denying the Holocaust and praising Adolf Hitler, the Sofia Globe reported. Interviewed by Bulgarian broadcaster Nova Televizia (NTV) ahead of the July 11 interviews for the Bulgarian legislature, the National Assembly, Ivanov made numerous claims, such as that Nazism wasn’t fascist but was national socialism, a picture of him doing a Nazi salute was actually a “Roman salute,” saying that Jews were happy under Hitler because they could work freely and that the gas chambers operated by the Nazis were used for deworming, as noted by the Sofia Globe. (…) The Bulgarian National Union – New Democracy Party is a far-right party that espouses what they call “Bulgarian values” and is widely considered neo-Nazi. In 2019, the party hosted a conference of other far-right and neo-Nazi groups from across Europe, coming from Germany, Poland, France, Hungary and the Czech Republic, according to Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).
However, as noted by BIRN, while spreading neo-Nazi ideology is illegal in Bulgaria, it is rarely actually prosecuted.
via jerusalem post: Bulgarian far-right candidate denies Holocaust, praises Hitler, Nazis