Bulgarians will go to the polls for the eighth time in five years later this month, after a massive wave of protests brought down Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s right-wing coalition at the end of last year. Demonstrations broke out in November in response to the proposed 2026 budget, which sought to hike social security contributions and taxes, increase salaries for the police, defence agencies and judiciary while leaving rank-and-file administrative workers, teachers and hospital staff with pay rises hardly covering inflation. The budget was also the first to be denominated in euros, Bulgaria having been approved to join the Eurozone last year, which inflamed popular anxiety about inflation. The protests peaked on 10 December, when more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, with tens of thousands more turning out across almost all regional cities. The next day Zhelyazkov – having been in power for less than a year – announced his resignation on live television, minutes before a scheduled parliamentary vote of confidence.

The protests were lazily described as another ‘Gen Z revolt’ by the liberal media, while some on the left dismissed them as orchestrated by the opposition coalition, the centrist PP-DB. Yet they unleashed political energies that far transcended the nominal organizers: the PP-DB’s approval ratings are around 15 per cent; an estimated 71 per cent supported the protests. Surveys revealed, moreover, that they were not confined to angry youth. Many participants were middle-aged, animated by concerns for a dignified old age for their parents, affordable healthcare, education for their children, and profoundly distrustful about how the higher taxes – raised from wages already strained by inflation – would be spent given widespread corruption.

In fact, the budget was the catalyst for an eruption of much deeper and longer-running discontent – a popular outcry against oligarchic capture, the erosion of social welfare and the stasis, even paralysis, of the political system as a whole. Over the past 15 years, successive coalition governments, predominantly led by the notoriously corrupt centre-right Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), have offered no coherent vision, whether for the economy, essential services or broader issues such as the environment, justice and foreign policy. Bulgaria’s poverty rate is 37 per cent, among the highest in the EU. Seventy-four per cent of those aged 14 to 29 are considering emigration in pursuit of a higher standard of living. Bulgarian sociologist Jivko Georgiev has sharply diagnosed the impasse: ‘We live in a present so impotent that it lacks the strength to become the past.’

To understand what brought so many to the streets across the country, one must grasp the extent to which Bulgaria’s ruling elite has fallen into disrepute – including the opposition notionally leading the protests. The PP was founded on an anti-corruption platform in 2021, following a prior wave of demonstrations against perceived overreach by the prosecutor general. Its ‘Harvard-educated’ and staunchly pro-EU leaders initially sparked enthusiasm, capturing 25 per cent of the vote in the 2021 parliamentary elections and joining a coalition government. However, the coalition was sabotaged by the centre-right There Is Such a People (ITN), triggering another two rounds of elections. Then, in June 2023, the PP-DB announced a coalition agreement with its former antagonist, GERB.

The PP-DB justified this extraordinary reversal by invoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the need for a strong ‘Euro-Atlanticist’ front. GERB’s leader argued that the key dividing line in Bulgarian politics was ‘who is on the side of Ukraine and who isn’t’. Pressure from the public sphere was intense: in April 2023, a petition by prominent Bulgarian intellectuals had urged pro-European parties to unite behind rapid military modernization and support for Ukraine, invoking the memory of the 1944–47 Soviet occupation of Bulgaria. Once in power, the coalition’s main achievement was a controversial judicial and constitutional reform designed to smooth Bulgaria’s entry into the Schengen area and the Eurozone. The attempt to impress Brussels in order to complete Bulgaria’s ‘European transition’ seems only to have further undermined the authority of the country’s post-socialist elites, especially as Europe’s frailties and internal contradictions become ever more obvious, and as citizens around the bloc feel the cost of sustained geopolitical confrontation in the form of austerity. With the collapse of the PP-DB-GERB coalition in 2024, after just ten months, every major political faction appeared tarnished. With the partial exception of one figure: President Rumen Radev, who, elected in 2017 and re-elected in 2021, has been one of the few stable fixtures in Bulgarian politics over the past decade. Radev distanced himself rhetorically from both the adoption of the euro and the government’s confrontational stance vis-a-vis Russia. The pro-EU coalition dismissed him as Putin’s ‘fifth column’ – despite his master’s degree from a US Air Force college and having served in a NATO member army for 12 years. But his alienation may have only burnished the image he was cultivating as an outlier – outside (or perhaps above) the corruption and petty squabbling of the governing class.

It was thus not difficult to foresee that Radev, by far the country’s most popular politician, would sooner or later leave the largely ceremonial post of president and seek to consolidate his own political project. In January, he resigned from the presidency; one month later, after years of speculation, he announced his intention to run as head of a new centre-left party, Progressive Bulgaria. Aiming to fill the void left by the collapse of the Euro-Atlantic bloc, Radev’s alliance is currently polling at 31 per cent, 10 points ahead of its nearest rival, the GERB-led coalition. Presenting his new electoral vehicle as ‘the answer to the expectations of Bulgarians to dismantle the oligarchic corruption model’, Radev is clearly appealing to those who joined the protests last year. Should the polls prove correct, his party will likely form a coalition with the PP-DB, currently forecast to take 12 per cent, united around a shared opposition to corruption.

Radev’s popular appeal is not hard to explain. Although an unassuming figure, the former president is the only politician, outside of extreme right-wing nationalists, to articulate even moderate criticisms of Bulgaria’s social and political trajectory. Even within these limited ideological horizons, such dissent stands out in a political field dominated by servility to Brussels and the neoliberal consensus. At the press conference unveiling his new political project, although Radev reaffirmed Bulgaria’s place in the EU and NATO, he emphasized the importance of defending Bulgaria’s national interests, calling for ‘critical thinking and sober assessments’ in determining the country’s foreign policy.

Yet beyond this rhetorical pivot towards sovereigntism, it remains unclear what Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria will offer in the way of meaningful progress. The party’s electoral programme includes much of the neoliberal boilerplate voters know all too well: ‘fiscal stability’ (i.e., retaining the country’s regressive tax system), curtailing state interference in the economy, ‘cutting red tape and reducing administrative burdens’, and introducing AI into all areas of public administration, from the courts to social services. Social justice is portrayed as a knock-on effect of defeating corruption and boosting investor confidence, both of which will somehow be accomplished through extensive digitalization. And belying his public image as a foreign policy maverick, Radev’s platform calls for increased military spending and integration with NATO forces in terms that could have been lifted from a Brussels policy paper.

Nevertheless, curbing corruption would be real progress, especially if Radev manages to reverse the widespread capture of Bulgarian public institutions by clientelist networks linked to GERB and its junior partner, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), currently headed by the universally despised media mogul and oligarch Delyan Peevski. By forming a stable governing coalition and cutting off the flow of state funds to these actors, Radev and PP-DB could perhaps, at least in this limited sense, turn Bulgaria into the ‘normal European country’ for which Bulgarian liberals have yearned for decades. Reining in corruption is of course a bare minimum. The ongoing salience of the issue is symptomatic of the ideological desert of Bulgarian politics. Voters, facing a structural lack of prospects, see no viable avenue for advancement outside the clientelist networks, which distribute public contracts and jobs in poorer regions. The fundamental task remains the translation of popular anger and aspiration into a coherent political project founded on material concerns rather than ‘restoring free markets’ – in other words, freeing them from corrupt monopolies – which seems to be the horizon of Radev’s project. Nevertheless, the prospect of sidelining the discredited GERB for the foreseeable future may, at least, bring some reprieve from the endless cycle of corruption scandals, and perhaps open a clearing for substantive discussion of Bulgaria’s deeper political challenges.

Read on: Christopher Bickerton, ‘The Persistence of Europe’, NLR 122.