Bulgaria went to the polls on 9 June, to elect its own parliament as well as its delegation to the European parliament. The joint exercise failed to excite the voters: turnout was 33.4%, down 5.7 points from the last national election, although that’s quite a normal figure for its European elections (in fact up slightly on the last one).
There’s a good reason, of course, for the lack of excitement. This was Bulgaria’s sixth national election in the space of just over three years. All six have produced broadly similar results; the electorate is not swinging wildly from one option to another, but the politicians have been consistently unable to produce a stable government out of the parliament that they’ve been given.
My preview of last year’s election (number five in the series) is probably the best place to start in understanding the story; it includes a handy set of links to the previous stages. That election, after a long period of negotiation, eventually produced a coalition government in which the two largest pro-Ukrainian parties, GERB (centre-right establishment) and PP-DB (centrist, reformist), agreed to share power, alternating at the head of a coalition.
But last March, when GERB’s nominee was supposed to take over as prime minister, it all fell apart. The two parties were unable to agree on ministerial appointments, and after alternative solutions were rejected president Rumen Radev dissolved parliament yet again. Auditor-general Dimitar Glavchev was appointed to head a caretaker government.
The election results suggest that the voters mainly blamed PP-DB for the breakdown. Its vote fell almost ten points to 13.9% and it lost 25 of its 64 seats. (See official results here.*) GERB’s vote, on the other hand, was stable, down just 1.4% to 24.0%, giving it 68 of the 240 seats (down one). So even if the two manage to re-form their coalition, they no longer have a majority between them.
You might expect that a dysfunctional political scene like this would be fertile ground for the far right, but its gains were only modest. The main far-right party, Revival, was almost unchanged with 13.4% (down 0.2%) and 38 seats (up one), but two new parties also competed for the same space: Velichie just made it into parliament with 4.5% and 13 seats, while Morality, Unity, Honor fell short of the 4% threshold with 2.9%.
Instead the biggest gains went to the centrist Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), up by 3.4% to take second place with 16.6% and 47 seats (up 11). The Socialists (centre-left, establishment but pro-Russian) were in fifth place with 6.9% (down 1.7%) and 19 seats (down four), followed by ITN (right-wing populist reformist) on 5.8% (up 1.9%) and 16 seats (up five).
The rise in DPS’s vote means that it and GERB, who have governed together in the past, are now close to a majority with 115 seats. No government will be able to be formed without them, and they only need to gain the tolerance of one other party, most likely ITN. Yesterday the three combined (although not without some drama) to elect GERB’s nominee as Speaker, signalling a likely future of co-operation.
They will not always see eye to eye – GERB tends towards Bulgarian nationalism while DPS is supported by the Turkish minority; ITN is lukewarm on supporting Ukraine while the other two are more committed – but it seems to be the most realistic option available. GERB and DPS are also the two parties most notorious for corruption, so the anti-corruption protests of 2020-21, which started the whole run of elections in the first place, seem to have come to an ignominious conclusion.
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* Technical note: the percentages in the official results factor out the “none of the above” vote; for consistency I have followed Wikipedia and put it back in. Doing so puts ITN actually below the threshold last time with 3.9%, whereas the electoral commission credited it with 4.1%.
The World is Not Enough 