Bulgaria has had enough

Bulgaria has punished corruption. The victory of Rumen Radev and his progressive coalition in Sunday's elections in the poorest country in the European Union is the result of general weariness with a regime of rampant corruption, state capture, influence peddling, and embezzlement. A mafia rooted for years and fueled by European funds that have arrived since Bulgaria's entry into the EU in 2007.

Radev, who resigned in January from the presidency of the country, which he had held since 2017, to try to capitalize on discontent against the government with a new formation, promised in his campaign to dismantle the "mafia state" and end political instability. The polls have given him the first absolute majority since 1997, but it remains to be seen if he can carry out his anti-oligarch agenda.

The victory of this politician and former soldier cannot be understood without the massive mobilization in the streets of Bulgaria in December 2025 and all the large-scale protests that have periodically denounced the web of enrichment and impunity built by the conservative Boyko Borissov, three-time prime minister since 2009 and a key piece of a corrupt system whose central core is the so-called siloviki, an oligarchy closely linked to the security services of the communist era, which took advantage of the subsequent power vacuum to accumulate wealth and political influence in the nineties. 

In December, Bulgaria experienced the largest protests since the return of democracy, with tens of thousands of young people in the streets demonstrating against a system they directly identify with Borissov and the oligarch Delyan Peevski. They are the main responsible for a democratic setback that, once again, the European Union watched helplessly to impose reforms on its own member states, even when, in June 2021, the United States Treasury Department imposed sanctions on three Bulgarian oligarchs and a network of more than sixty companies and organizations related to corruption – one of them being media mogul Delyan Peevski. 

A report recently published by the Union for Civil Liberties for Europe (Liberties), which collects evidence provided by more than 40 NGOs from 22 EU countries, pointed to Bulgaria – along with Croatia, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia – as the five EU member states that are "consistently and intentionally" eroding the rule of law. The report directly accuses the outgoing government of regression in judicial independence and of attacks on judges and journalists.

Sunday's elections have cemented the growing distance between the widespread discontent of the population and Borissov's GERB, which achieved only 13% of the votes.

European reality continues to be marked by inequalities, which have continued to increase in recent decades. Bulgaria is the poorest country in the Union, with rampant inflation, a housing crisis and a continuous loss of population. With this scenario, it cannot be the case that Brussels' main concern after the elections is whether the new government will be more pro-Russian than the previous one. Just a week after Viktor Orbán's defeat in Hungary, cyclothymic Europe is again moving from euphoria to concern at the pace of each election day, as if reality were determined by a specific candidate and not by the process of continuous erosion that has led to so much instability and electoral weakness.

Radev represents a pro-Russian stance shared by other governments in the region, from Slovakia's Robert Fico to the Czech Andrej Babis. Illiberal figures who have also accelerated the regression of the rule of law in their countries. However, experts agree that none of them intend to establish themselves as the counter-power that Orbán has exercised in Brussels all these years. Furthermore, a survey published in March asked Bulgarians to choose a single strategic partner: more than 56% chose Europe; 19% chose Russia. Only 8% opted for the United States.

Bulgaria needs the EU. The country has joined Schengen and the euro after many years of asking for it. The mobilized Bulgarian society, which has defied the inertia of abuses, corruption and rights violations they have endured for decades, looks towards Brussels and not towards Moscow.