Cartoonists Earn a Prime Minister’s Ire — and His Subscription By BORYANA DZHAMBAZOVAMAY 5, 2017 Satire that pushes the boundaries of taste is nothing new in the West, but in Bulgaria — the European Union’s poorest country, and ranked by Reporters Without Borders as the worst in the 28-nation bloc when it comes to press freedom — Prass Press has quickly found readers. Only 12 percent of Bulgarians see their news media as independent, while 65 percent think otherwise, according to a 2015 survey by the Media Democracy Foundation, done jointly with a foundation established by the Christian Democratic Union, a political party in Germany. Christo Komarnitski, another founder of Prass Press, said that he had thought that "no one buys newspapers anymore," and was "blown away by the overwhelming interest" in the first several issues. In April 2016, Nova TV, one of the biggest private television channels in Bulgaria, terminated Mr. Nikolov’s contract and removed his cartoons from its website after he depicted Mr. Borisov as a leader of a group of vigilantes "hunting" for migrants along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey.
