Volen Siderov

Siderov said that the treaty is invalid, because it was signed with Yugoslavia in 1919, a vanished state, and does not refer to the present-day Serbia or to North Macedonia and should be cancelled.

The first statement ever of Volen Siderov from the parliamentary tribune, for a plan for a giant genocide of the Bulgarian nation, coming from abroad:

"…In this 8-year period gigantic genocide was carried out over the Bulgarian nation. At the insistence of foreign, hostile to Bulgaria factors, of our people is projected to remain 3.5 to 4 million residents. This is Bulgarophobe's plan and this plan is realised in front of us. If someone asks how, I will show him: when the right of the Bulgarians to be masters in their own country became stolen, when they will be left to die in misery and lack of medicines and medical services, by being subjected to terror by Gypsy bands, who everyday [sic] disrupt, rob, rape and maltreat the Bulgarian nation, after which nobody deliberately seeks out the crimes, committed by them, because this is the directive outside, not to investigate the crimes of these minority groups. The goal is for the Bulgarians to live in fear, to be discouraged, crushed, submissive. Hundreds of thousands of chronically ill are dying right now because mob companies of the previous cabinet make dirty deals with the life and health of the Bulgarians.

Because relatives of the previous Minister of Environment are trading with medicaments for cancer and therefore there are not any medicaments, and hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians with cancer face a slow, excruciating agony."

Volen Nikolov Siderov (Волен Николов Сидеров ; born 19 April 1956) is a Bulgarian far-right politician and chairman of the nationalist party Attack.

He has been the editor of numerous newspapers and has authored five books.

In 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Bulgarian courts had erred in not upholding civil discrimination claims against Siderov for his anti-Jewish and anti-Romani statements.

Siderov was born in 1956 in Yambol, Bulgaria.

He received an undergraduate degree in Applied Photography in Sofia, and before the fall of Communism in 1989, worked at the National Literature Museum as a photographer.

His brother, Dr. Plamen Siderov, was a mathematician and lectured at Sofia University.

After the fall of Communism, Siderov became a member of the newly established Movement for Human Rights.

During the fall of 1990, he became the editor-in-chief of Democracy (Демокрация), the official newspaper of the Union of Democratic Forces (Siderov played a major role in establishing the paper as the official publication of the right-wing party).

At one point he was appointed deputy editor-in-chief of Monitor, a newspaper of a political orientation that could be described as nationalist and conservative.

In 2000, Siderov was presented with the award of the Union of the Bulgarian Journalists.

Later, he came to be the host of Attack, a talk show on the Bulgarian cable TV channel "SKAT".

In 2002 Siderov was invited to a controversial anti-globalisation conference in Moscow where he associated with people like Ahmed Rami and David Duke.

During the 2003 local elections Siderov ran for mayor of Sofia on the ticket of the marginal National Association-BZNS Party.

He received 1,728 votes, or 0.45%.

That attempt passed largely unnoticed for the general public.

Units 1 and 2 were taken shut down in the end of 2003 and units 3 and 4 were taken out of operation in the final hours of 2006, immediately prior to the country's accession to the European Union.

From time to time Siderov is involved in scandals that include hooliganism.

During a televised debate in the show Referendum on Bulgarian National Television (BNT), after arriving late, Siderov questioned the sexual orientation of IMRO leader Angel Dzhambazki, as well as Krasimir Karakachanov's property deals and alluded to what he alleged was underhanded support by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms for the nationalist IMRO party.

During the June 2005 parliamentary elections, already a popular TV host, Siderov organised and led the party "Attack", named after his talk show.

In the 2009 elections Attack won 9.4% (395,000 votes) of the total vote.

Siderov reportedly espouses anti-Masonic conspiracy theories, claiming that Masons control the world through puppet regimes, international organizations, and the press.

According to Siderov, these forces seek to commit genocide against Bulgarian people.

Attack opposes the membership of Bulgaria in NATO; Siderov has declared that the people were lied to, that Bulgaria would be the safest place by then Bulgarian Minister of Foreign Affairs—Solomon Pasi—but the result was reducing the Bulgarian army to 20,000 troops and in necessity Bulgaria would be defenseless as the Turkish government wants.

He compared the accession of Bulgaria to NATO as a new signing of the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine, considered as humiliating treaty for Bulgaria, signed after World War I.

Although the party is ambivalent on Bulgaria's European Union membership, it has demanded a revision of some of the previous agreements (e.g. the resolution on shutting down the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant near the Danube), it claims that those who signed the EU membership, referring to Meglena Kuneva and others, are national traitors, not because of the EU membership itself, but because of the "anti-Bulgarian" agreements, on which it is signed.

Siderov expressed respect to the Russian president Vladimir Putin, by visiting him on foot for his 60th birthday on 7 October 2012.

On 8 March 2013 Siderov paid tribute to the deceased president of Venezuela Hugo Chávez at the Bolivarian republic's embassy in Sofia, where he called the revolutionary an 'example for the Bulgarian patriots as a statesman'.

Attack insists on the cancellation of Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine and the returning of the Western Outlands to Bulgaria, annexed by Yugoslavia after the First World War, which consists of the regions of Dimitrovgrad and Bosilegrad in Serbia, whose population according to the Serbian national census is predominantly ethnic Bulgarian, and of the region of Strumica in North Macedonia.

The party won 8.14% (296,848 votes) of the total vote, thus becoming the 4th largest party in parliament.

In September 2018, Siderov met with Israeli MK Oren Hazan, a member of the Likud party, during the latter's visit to Bulgaria.

Hazan defended the meeting by noting that Siderov "said he apologized for what he had said" about the Holocaust in the past, and Hazan then "told him he needed to do it publicly".

Siderov has generated increasing controversy as Attack has improved at the polls.

He has been labeled xenophobic, and his persona has been called "a studied imitation of Hitler".

He has criticised the "symbiotic relationship" between established political parties and organised criminal groups.

He has also spoken against the widespread discrimination against majority ethnic Bulgarians by their own state, particularly in relation to the alleged non-prosecution by the state of crimes committed by ethnic minorities and the free provision to certain ethnic groups of social services that have been denied to ordinary Bulgarians.

Siderov and his party "Attack" were among the few Bulgarian political forces that opposed the closing of the four units of the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant.