Bulgaria, which went to the polls yesterday, has been in a more or less constant state of political crisis for the last six years, ever since protests erupted in the middle of 2020 against the government of then prime minister Boyko Borisov. A subsequent election in April 2021 failed to produce a workable majority, and so the elections kept coming: this was the eighth in that time, easily a record for any democracy.
You can read about the sequence in this 2023 post, updated earlier this year. But the basic problem was that the country was divided along competing axes, roughly pro- vs anti-establishment and pro- vs anti-Russian, making it impossible to construct a coalition with majority support. Until now.
Change came this year with the resignation of president Rumen Radev, a year before the expiry of his term, and his formation of a new political alliance, Progressive Bulgaria, to contest the parliamentary election. And although counting is still continuing (87.2% of returns in so far), the result is absolutely clear: Progressive Bulgaria has won a landslide victory, currently with 44.6% of the vote, more than thirty points clear of its nearest rival. (See official results here.)
The only two other tickets to reach double figures are the centrist-reformist PP-DB with 13.5% and the establishment centre-right party GERB (still led by Borisov) on 13.3%. Another six parties are clustered in a narrow band close to the 4% threshold. It appears that two have made it across – the liberal/establishment DPS with 6.1% and the far-right Revival with 4.4% – while the other four (two more far-right parties, a new anti-corruption movement and the centre-left establishment Socialists) have missed out.
With so many votes soaked up by parties that fell short of representation, there’s no doubt that Progressive Bulgaria will win a clear majority (although this understanding has escaped the BBC). According to one estimate it is set for 130 seats in the 240-seat parliament. Radev will also win some support from PP-DB, since they share the objective of clearing out corruption and reforming the “mafia state” that Bulgaria is said to have become under Borisov and other oligarchs.
While Radev campaigned on domestic issues, there’s no doubt that he sits towards the pro-Russian or Eurosceptic end of the spectrum (unlike PP-DB, which is pro-European). Russia is a historic ally for Bulgaria, so sustaining a pro-Ukrainian policy – as Borisov, for all his other faults, tried to do – was never going to be easy. But it seems unlikely that Radev will stick his neck out to obstruct European aid to Ukraine in the way that Hungary’s Viktor Orbán had done.
Having been dragged back to the polls so often, Bulgarian’s voters evidently decided that someone needed to be given a solid mandate, and Radev had projected an image of stability and rationality during the long-running crisis. The voters are probably also sick of hearing Bulgaria described as the most corrupt state in the European Union: as a result the three main establishment parties (GERB, DPS and the Socialists) fell to a combined total of just 22.4% between them, about half the vote that they managed last October.
Updates to come as results are finalised.
The World is Not Enough 