"WE'LL MAKE IT! BELIEVE TN YOURSELVES!," he called on the crowd at a rally of the Union of Democratic Eorces. Could Bulgaria's President Zhelyu Zhelev suspect at that moment that only two years later the wildly cheering crowd would be demanding his resignation, booing and abusing him? Politics is a gamble in which the spectators run the risk of losing just as the gamblers do, seasoned statesmen usually say in such cases to console themselves.

However, Zhelyu Zhelev does not have their experience and it is hardly likely that ten years ago be could have suspected that tumultuous events were to take him to the top. Like most Bulgarian politicians he has a peasant background. He was born in the village of Vesselinovo near Shoumen in 1935 and studied philosophy at the Sofia University. Until his graduation nothing indicated there was an extraordinary turn ahead of him. Zhelyu Zhelev was an activist of the Communist Youth Union and became a member of the Communist Party. It seems that his honesty, his militant implacability to falseness and hypocrisy in daily life as well as in the world of ideas made him follow hopefully the changes in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death. But he was bitterly disappointed, as, like in Bulgaria, the long-awaited reforms there ended in the late 5Os and the early 60s, only skimming the surface of the stagnant waters.

Zhelev's revolt was now imminent, and in his thesis he dared attack the very foundarions of the sacred philosophy of Leninism. The party leadership was horrified and the "blasphemer" became one of the few lonely rebels against the essence of the socialist system a dissident.

In 1972 be was ordered to leave Sofia, lost his job and buried himself in his work in a life full of hardships. Only after the slight ideological thawing was he able to defend his thesis and become a doctor of philosophy. Friends helped him find a job. And then, in the early 80s, he published his famous book, Fascism, in which the clear parallel with communism again provoked the authorities to vent their fury upon him. He became a target for persecution.

The perestroyka launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union again revived his hope. In 1 988 he set up the half-illegal Club for Glasnost and Perestroyka. Together with other organizations marking the emergence of a civil society in Bulgaria, it stepped up Zhivkov's downfall on 10 November 1898 .

A month later Zhelyu Zhelev became leader of the Union of Democratic Eorces, the political opposition in Bulgaria.

On T August 1990 the Grand National Assembly elected him President of Bulgaria. These were the days when he displayed his best abilities as a politician. He proposed a number of ideas and agreements that contributed to the removal of the communist framework. Zhelev managed to preserve civil peace when starvation, rallies, strikes and hatred were threatening to destroy the country's fragile balance. In 1992 he became the first president of Bulgaria to be elected democratically in fair presidential elections.

Two years later, however, he was no longer supported by the political forces and personalities who had backed him in parliament and during the elections. He came to power in the name of democracy and has ruled in the name of democracy, for he believes it to be the only way for Bulgaria's progress in the hard years of transition. But the efforts towards the implementation of democracy have so far brought about economic collapse, unemployment and weakening of cultural values and morale.

Yet the hope remains that what matters most is not life in the present but the course taken.