Politics 1
An analytical guide for readers unfamiliar with Bulgarian politics
Imagine being asked to hold a national election, then another, then five more — all within the span of five years. That is not a thought experiment. That is Bulgaria. Between April 2021 and April 2026, this Balkan EU member state held eight separate parliamentary elections. Governments rose and collapsed with startling speed. Coalitions were assembled over weeks of painful negotiation, only to unravel within months. Caretaker administrations — temporary technocratic governments appointed by the president when no parliament can agree on a cabinet — became almost routine. At one point, only 6% of Bulgarians said they trusted their own parliament, one of the most dismal figures recorded anywhere in Europe.
To outsiders, and even to many Bulgarians, this can seem baffling. Bulgaria is a NATO member since 2004. It joined the European Union in 2007. It adopted the euro in January 2026 after meeting strict economic criteria. It is, by most formal measures, a functioning democracy. So why does it keep tearing its governments apart?
The answer is not simple, but it is understandable. Bulgaria’s instability is the product of overlapping forces: a political system structurally prone to fragmentation, a history that left institutions weak and public trust in short supply, deep-rooted corruption, an economy that has frustrated generations of citizens, and a geopolitical position that makes even routine policy decisions contested. Understanding each of these layers — and how they interact — is the key to making sense of one of the EU’s most turbulent democracies.
Section 1: How Bulgaria’s Political System Works
Bulgaria is a parliamentary democracy, which means the government is formed by whoever commands a majority in the legislature, not by direct popular vote for a prime minister. The parliament — called the National Assembly — has 240 seats. After each election, parties negotiate to form a governing coalition: an alliance of two or more parties that together hold more than 120 seats, giving them a majority.
The prime minister holds the real executive power and leads the day-to-day running of the country. The president, by contrast, is elected separately and has a largely ceremonial role, though the president gains outsized importance during political crises — specifically, the power to dissolve parliament and call snap elections when no government can be formed.
The challenge is that no single party has come close to winning an outright majority in recent years. Bulgaria uses a proportional representation system, where parties receive seats roughly in proportion to their share of the national vote. This is considered democratic and fair, but it almost always produces a parliament divided among five, six, seven, or more parties — none of which can govern alone.
That makes coalition-building essential, and coalition-building requires trust, ideological compatibility, and willingness to compromise. In Bulgaria, all three have been in chronic short supply.
Section 2: The Historical Roots of Political Instability
To understand Bulgaria today, you need to understand where it came from.
For over four decades, Bulgaria was a communist state aligned tightly with the Soviet Union. The regime that fell in November 1989 left behind not a clean slate, but a tangled inheritance: secret police networks woven through the economy, a state apparatus staffed by party loyalists, and a society with no independent judicial tradition, no functioning civil society, and no experience of multiparty politics.
The transition to democracy in the 1990s was chaotic. Bulgaria’s first post-communist decade was marked by severe economic crises. By 1996–1997, hyperinflation had rendered savings worthless, banks had collapsed, and the country came close to total economic meltdown. The Bulgarian Socialist Party — the direct successor to the Communist Party — governed through much of this period, and the association between the political left, the old regime, and economic catastrophe poisoned Bulgarian public discourse for years.
This turbulent transition had lasting structural consequences. Courts, prosecutors, and regulatory bodies were never fully reformed. Many judges and officials from the communist era remained in place. The agencies nominally designed to fight corruption became vehicles for political patronage instead. Figures from the former secret services — the Darzhavna Sigurnost — found their way into business and politics, sometimes using their old networks to accumulate wealth and influence in the new market economy.
This became what analysts have called state capture: the process by which powerful private interests — oligarchs, organized crime figures, politically connected businessmen — gradually take control of state institutions meant to regulate and check them. By the 2010s, Bulgaria was regularly described by the European Commission as one of the EU’s most serious rule-of-law problems. Institutions existed on paper; their independence often did not.
When citizens look at their parliament today, they are looking through the lens of this history. The cynicism is not unfounded. It was learned over decades.
Section 3: Why Coalition Governments Keep Falling Apart
Building a coalition in Bulgaria is a uniquely difficult exercise, and not just because of arithmetic.
The party system is extraordinarily fragmented. In recent elections, anywhere from seven to ten parties have cleared the threshold to enter parliament. These parties range from center-right pro-European reformists to nostalgic socialists, from ethnic minority parties representing Bulgaria’s Turkish-speaking population to populist newcomers promising to burn the whole system down. Getting them to agree on a governing program, let alone to sustain one, is extremely difficult.
Ideological differences are genuinely deep. The sharpest fault lines are not traditional left-right economic divisions but rather questions of corruption and geopolitics. Is a given party genuinely anti-corruption, or is it merely posturing? Is it pro-Western or sympathetic to Russia? These questions divide not just voters but party leaderships, and they make coalition negotiations feel less like policy bargaining and more like mutual character assessments.
Personal rivalries compound the problem. Bulgarian politics is heavily personality-driven. Boyko Borisov, the dominant political figure of the post-2009 era and longtime leader of the center-right GERB party, inspires fierce loyalty among his supporters and equally fierce contempt among his opponents. For years, almost every other party defined itself partly in opposition to Borisov — making any coalition involving GERB politically toxic for potential partners, even when the electoral arithmetic demanded it.
The result is a cycle that has repeated itself multiple times: elections produce a fragmented parliament, coalition talks drag on for weeks or months, a government is eventually formed on the basis of minimal common ground, something disrupts the delicate balance, and the coalition collapses. A vote of no confidence — a formal parliamentary vote to dismiss the government — is then used to bring it down. In June 2022, Kiril Petkov’s coalition became the first Bulgarian government in modern history to fall by a successful confidence vote.
Even the most creatively designed coalitions have struggled. In 2023, GERB and the anti-corruption coalition PP-DB (We Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria) agreed to a rotating government arrangement — an almost unprecedented structure in which each bloc would provide the prime minister for alternating periods. It fell apart within months, undermined by disagreements over judicial appointments and energy policy.
Section 4: Corruption and Public Distrust
Corruption is not simply a complaint Bulgarians make about their politicians. According to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, Bulgaria consistently ranks second-to-last in the European Union, behind only Hungary. That ranking reflects a systemic reality: graft, patronage, and the intertwining of political and business interests reach deep into Bulgarian public life.
The most dramatic illustration came in the summer of 2020, when leaked photographs showed Prime Minister Boyko Borisov apparently sleeping next to a bedside drawer filled with cash and gold bars. The images, which Borisov did not deny but claimed were planted, crystallized years of public suspicion. Mass protests erupted across Sofia and other cities, with demonstrators chanting “Mafia out!” — a slogan that captured the sense that the state itself had been colonized by criminal interests.
Those protests did not immediately topple the government, but they fundamentally delegitimized Borisov’s rule. When elections came in April 2021, GERB won the largest share of the vote but could not form a government: every other party refused to work with it. Three more elections followed over the next two years.
The corruption problem is not merely about individual politicians pocketing money, though that certainly happens. It is more structurally serious: courts that decline to prosecute powerful defendants, regulators who overlook violations by well-connected firms, and public procurement processes that funnel EU funds to politically affiliated contractors. Borisov himself was arrested in 2022 as part of an investigation into the misuse of EU structural funds, then released without charge — an outcome that, as one analyst drily noted, was “a familiar result in many Bulgarian corruption investigations.”
This chronic impunity has not just angered citizens; it has fragmented them politically. When you do not trust any institution to deliver justice, you search constantly for political saviors. You vote for whoever promises most convincingly to clean things up. And when they inevitably fail — because the system is designed to resist them — you abandon them and search for the next one.
Section 5: The Rise of New Political Parties
Every few years, a new political force emerges in Bulgaria promising to be different. It typically rockets in polls, enters parliament on a wave of anti-establishment enthusiasm, and then confronts the brutal realities of governing in a fragmented, corrupt system.
We Continue the Change (PP), founded by Kiril Petkov and Asen Vasilev — both Harvard-educated technocrats who had briefly served as ministers — is the most prominent recent example. They presented themselves as an entirely new kind of Bulgarian politician: competent, clean, and pro-European. Their government, formed in late 2021, passed important reforms and took firm pro-Western positions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It lasted less than eight months before being brought down by a confidence vote, supported by — among others — its supposed coalition partner.
There is Such a People (ITN), founded by a television entertainer named Slavi Trifonov, is another example. It performed remarkably well in 2021 elections, presenting itself as a voice of ordinary Bulgarians against the political class. Once in coalition, it proved unable to translate populist energy into coherent governance.
The pattern is almost predictable. New parties benefit from protest votes — citizens casting ballots not because they believe in the party’s program but because they want to punish the incumbents. Once these parties enter government, they face the same structural constraints everyone else does: obstructive judiciary, resistant bureaucracy, coalition partners with divergent interests, and the grinding complexity of actual policymaking. Voters who expected miracles become disillusioned. The cycle of disappointment continues.
What this produces, over time, is a political landscape where almost every party has been tried and found wanting. Trust in institutions declines further. New formations emerge, are tried, and fail. The churn does not stop.
Section 6: Why Bulgaria Keeps Holding Early Elections
The mechanics of Bulgarian political crisis follow a fairly consistent pattern, and it is worth understanding how the constitutional machinery works.
After an election, the largest party gets the first chance to form a government. If it cannot secure a parliamentary majority, the mandate passes to the second-largest party. If that also fails, the mandate goes to the third. If all three attempts fail, the president dissolves parliament, appoints a caretaker government — a technocratic administration tasked only with running day-to-day affairs — and schedules a new election.
This process sounds orderly, but it has several vulnerabilities. Coalition negotiations can drag on for weeks, during which the country operates in political limbo. Parties sometimes refuse mandates strategically, calculating that new elections will improve their position. The president’s power to select caretaker ministers has itself become contested, with parliament passing constitutional amendments in 2023 to constrain presidential discretion — a sign of how even procedural questions become partisan battlegrounds.
Caretaker governments, meanwhile, have real limitations: they cannot make major policy decisions, pass new laws, or negotiate important agreements. A country that spends significant stretches of each year under caretaker administration is a country that cannot fully function. Institutional reforms get deferred. EU-required legislation stalls. Key judicial bodies continue operating with expired mandates because parliament cannot agree on replacements. The Bulgarian Supreme Judicial Council, for example, operated for years beyond its mandate because the political deadlock made new appointments impossible.
The result is a slow erosion of institutional capacity that makes the next crisis harder to manage than the last.
Section 7: External Factors
Bulgaria’s political difficulties cannot be understood in isolation from its geopolitical position, which is genuinely complicated.
Bulgaria has deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to Russia. The Orthodox Christian faith, the Cyrillic alphabet that Russia helped standardize, and the perception that Russia liberated Bulgaria from Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century — these connections are emotionally significant for many Bulgarians. For decades, they also translated into practical dependence: Bulgaria relied on Russian gas, Russian oil refined at the LUKOIL-owned Neftokhim refinery, and Russian nuclear technology at its Kozloduy power plant.
That dependence gave Russia significant leverage — and created a ready-made fault line for Bulgarian politics. Questions about weapons deliveries to Ukraine, sanctions on Russia, and energy diversification became not merely policy debates but proxy battles between pro-Western and pro-Russian political blocs. The fall of Kiril Petkov’s government in 2022 — brought down in part by parties that objected to his strongly pro-Western stance — was widely interpreted as partly motivated by geopolitical disagreement.
Since then, the picture has shifted considerably. The pro-Western Petkov government had cut Bulgaria’s natural gas dependence on Russia from around 95% to near zero within two months of the invasion of Ukraine, refusing to pay in rubles as Moscow demanded. That dramatic repositioning has largely held. Bulgaria has diversified its energy sources, expelled dozens of Russian intelligence officers, and moved closer to Western positions.
But the political wounds remain. The geopolitical question — how close should Bulgaria stand to the West, how much distance from Russia? — continues to be one of the most contentious cleavages in Bulgarian coalition negotiations, making it harder to find common ground between parties with genuinely different visions of where Bulgaria belongs in the world.
Section 8: The Economy and Voter Expectations
Economic frustration is, at its core, the fuel that keeps the protest cycle burning.
Bulgaria has made genuine economic progress since communism. Average monthly wages rose from around €200 at the time of EU accession to roughly €980 by 2024. The country achieved high-income economy status by World Bank criteria in 2024. GDP grew at 3.4% in 2024 — considerably faster than the eurozone average. In January 2026, Bulgaria adopted the euro, a milestone that required meeting strict criteria for fiscal discipline and inflation control.
But the aggregate numbers obscure painful realities. Income inequality is the highest in the European Union. Around 30% of the population remains at risk of poverty or social exclusion. Severozapaden, Bulgaria’s northwestern region, is the poorest region in the entire EU by GDP per capita — and has the lowest life expectancy to match. Rural areas are hollowing out as young people relocate to Sofia or leave the country entirely.
And leave they do. Since 1989, Bulgaria has lost roughly 25% of its population to a combination of low birth rates and emigration. Since EU accession alone, over a million Bulgarians — many of them young, educated, and skilled — have moved to Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Western Europe, drawn by wages that can be three to five times higher for equivalent work. Bulgaria suffers from one of the most severe brain drains anywhere in Europe. Hospitals struggle to retain doctors. Schools cannot keep teachers. Engineering firms cannot find engineers.
This demographic hemorrhage creates a vicious circle: the departure of productive workers reduces tax revenues, starves public services of talent, and slows economic convergence with Western Europe. The slower the convergence, the more attractive emigration looks to the next generation. And the more dissatisfied those who stay feel about a system that keeps failing to improve their lives.
For politicians, this translates into a population that is angry, impatient, and highly prone to political experimentation. When voters feel economically left behind, they are far less likely to extend patience to struggling coalition governments.
Section 9: Is Bulgaria Unique?
Bulgaria’s travails can seem exceptional, but coalition instability is by no means exclusive to the Balkans.
Belgium famously went 653 days without a government in 2010–2011, a world record at the time. Its fractured linguistic and political landscape makes coalition-building enormously complex, yet Belgian institutions remained largely functional throughout.
Italy has had more than 60 governments since 1946, and its postwar political history is essentially a series of overlapping coalition crises, corruption scandals, and institutional reforms. The Italian system has absorbed extraordinary instability without collapsing.
Israel has held multiple elections in quick succession in recent years as rival blocs proved unable to form working majorities, creating extended periods of political paralysis.
Spain has periodically required months of negotiation to form a government, with snap elections called when coalition talks fail.
What distinguishes Bulgaria from these cases is not the frequency of political crises per se, but the underlying conditions that produce them. Belgium, Italy, and Spain have stronger institutional foundations, more robust civil societies, better-resourced judiciaries, and higher levels of baseline public trust. In those countries, political deadlock is inconvenient. In Bulgaria, where institutions are already fragile, extended political gridlock actively damages the state’s capacity to function.
The comparison is instructive not to minimize Bulgaria’s difficulties, but to note that coalition instability is a structural feature of proportional representation systems wherever ideological divisions are deep and party systems are fragmented — not a uniquely Bulgarian pathology.
Section 10: Can Bulgaria Become More Stable?
Analysts and reformers have proposed a range of responses to Bulgaria’s recurring instability, though none is a quick fix.
Electoral reform is often discussed. Raising the threshold for parliamentary entry — currently 4% of the national vote — could reduce the number of small parties in parliament and make coalition arithmetic simpler. Critics argue, however, that higher thresholds disenfranchise voters who support smaller parties and can drive dissatisfied citizens toward abstention rather than engagement.
Judicial reform is considered essential by most serious analysts. A genuinely independent judiciary — one that prosecutes corruption regardless of a defendant’s political connections — would have two effects: reducing corruption itself, and demonstrating to citizens that accountability is possible. The EU has repeatedly pressed Bulgaria on this front, and the 2023 Denkov government made judicial reform a primary goal before it collapsed. The challenge is that reforming the courts requires parliamentary agreement from the very political forces that benefit from a pliable judiciary.
Anti-corruption institutions with real teeth — not just on paper — would help address the state capture problem. Several Bulgarian governments have promised such bodies. Creating them has proved far more difficult than announcing them.
Stronger coalition culture — the willingness of rival parties to make genuine compromises and honor them — is partly a question of political maturity and trust that can only develop over time. Some optimists point to the fact that Bulgaria’s various parties have been forced by circumstances into increasingly creative institutional arrangements, and that each crisis teaches lessons about what works and what does not.
There is also the question of civic engagement. The 2020 protests showed that Bulgarian civil society is capable of sustained, organized pressure. Younger, better-educated Bulgarians — including some who have returned from abroad — are increasingly engaged in reformist political projects. The rise of parties like PP demonstrated that new, credible political alternatives can emerge.
None of this guarantees stability. But the history of other post-communist democracies — Poland, Estonia, and Slovakia, for instance — suggests that democratic consolidation is possible, even if it takes decades and is rarely linear.
Conclusion
Bulgaria’s pattern of frequent elections, collapsing governments, and political gridlock is not a random malfunction. It is the predictable output of a specific set of conditions that reinforce each other.
The political system produces fragmented parliaments because proportional representation distributes votes widely across many parties. Coalition governments collapse because ideological divisions are deep, personal rivalries are intense, and trust between political forces is extremely thin. Public trust in institutions is low because corruption is endemic and impunity is common. Voters oscillate between old parties and new ones because none has yet delivered sustained, credible improvement. New parties rise and fall because the structural obstacles they face — a captured judiciary, a patronage-heavy bureaucracy, geopolitically divided coalition partners — are larger than any individual political project. And underlying all of this is an economy that has improved in aggregate but left too many people behind, generating a constant current of frustration that keeps the protest cycle turning.
Add to this Bulgaria’s exposed geopolitical position — between a EU and NATO demanding full alignment and a Russia that has cultivated deep influence inside Bulgarian society and politics for generations — and you have a country navigating extraordinarily complex crosscurrents.
The conclusion this might tempt us to draw — that Bulgarian democracy is simply failing — would be wrong. Democracies in the process of consolidation, particularly those emerging from authoritarian rule and economic trauma, almost always go through periods of painful instability. The fact that Bulgarian citizens keep voting, keep protesting, and keep demanding better is itself a sign of democratic vitality, not its absence. The protests of 2020 were not the cry of a population giving up. They were the cry of a population that still believes, however grudgingly, that their country can do better.
Bulgaria’s story is, in the end, a microcosm of one of the central challenges of the twenty-first century: how young democracies, with weak institutions and difficult histories, find their footing in a world that offers neither patience nor easy answers. The journey is rarely smooth. It rarely is, anywhere. But it is ongoing — and that, in itself, matters.
