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.

The pro-Russian and Eurosceptic Rumen Radev has clearly won the legislative elections in Bulgaria, a victory that could even allow him to govern alone, according to exit polls. Radev, who left the presidency in January to run in the legislative elections, is a former general and ex-pilot critical of political elites, with an anti-corruption discourse and who does not hide his sympathies for the Hungarian ultranationalist, Viktor Orbán. His party, We Continue the Change, would have obtained 38% of the votes, more than 20 points ahead of the second formation, the conservative party Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), led by former prime minister Boyko Borissov.

Bulgaria, the poorest country in the European Union, will hold its eighth parliamentary elections in five years this Sunday. The instability is not just political: inflation continues to soar, just a few months after the adoption of the euro. The favorite is former pro-Russian general Rumen Radev, who surprisingly resigned from the presidency to run in the elections at the head of the new Progressive Bulgaria (PB) coalition. His program combines social promises with a commitment to dismantle a system that many citizens consider oligarchic and clientelist.

Bulgaria, the poorest country in the European Union, will join the eurozone on January 1st. Nineteen years after joining the European Union, the Balkan nation of nearly 6.5 million people is thus completing its slow integration, after years of sacrifices to meet the requirements for adopting the single currency. These included sound public finances, moderate interest rates, and controlled inflation. The numbers added up, but Sofia will leave its currency, the lev, in a state of political crisis.

"I'm getting ready for the protest. We have no idea what's going to happen; they might resign," explained Tsvetozar, a young Bulgarian in his thirties, on Wednesday as he headed to Parliament, where young people had called for what they hoped would be the biggest mobilization of the decade. Less than 24 hours later, their wish came true. Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov announced the resignation of his government, a three-party coalition led by conservatives that had been in power for less than a year, in the country's lower house on Thursday. Yesterday's protests brought together tens of thousands of people who demanded the resignation of the government, which they accuse of corruption. "We have listened to the voice of society," stated the prime minister, who announced his resignation shortly before a vote of no confidence against the government, the sixth since he took office on January 15. Wednesday's demonstration was the third in just a few days called by the pro-European opposition party PP-DB against the government, a coalition of the conservative GERB party, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and the populist ITN. Bulgaria—which will join the eurozone in January—has been mired in political instability for years and has held seven elections since 2021. The protest movement began on December 1, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the 2026 budget, announced days earlier; a draft that included cuts to social spending, increased taxes on the self-employed and small businesses, and a lack of measures to combat inflation and corruption. Due to the public outcry—which culminated in clashes and arrests that same day—the government backtracked and canceled the budget's implementation. However, this "has been a turning point for Generation Z," explains Teodora, also from Sofia. "Every day more of us are joining this movement, and I believe that together we can achieve results." It's no longer just about budgets: what young Bulgarians are demanding, supported by a social majority that hadn't mobilized in over a decade, is an end to corruption and a government that has "held the state hostage."

When she was just a child, Kapka Kassabova (Sofia, 1973) spent her summers with her family in a seemingly idyllic village in southern Bulgaria called Michurin during the Soviet era (now Tsarevo). "I could consider myself privileged, because with my parents, who were scientists, we went on vacation, while many of the children I knew spent their summers working in the tobacco fields," she recalls now, coinciding with the publication of the first Catalan translation of one of her books. Border (Comanegra, 2025; translation by Ariadna Pous), which presented at the CCCB Kosmopolis festival“At that time, I couldn’t have known that in the villages of the so-called Red Riviera, one out of every two waiters worked for the Bulgarian State Security, and that there were also many KGB and Stasi agents secretly watching the East German vacationers: some of them were making their way through the forest, hoping for a new life far from communism,” she explains.

Georgi Gospodinov (Iambolo, 1968) is Bulgaria's most widely read and award-winning contemporary writer. A novelist, poet, and playwright, he has been translated into thirty languages. The Gardener and Death –which comes a year after the Booker Prize forThe shelter of time– proposes an autobiographical story about a son who, day after day, sees his father (Dinyo Gospodinov: an ironic and vital man) fade away due to illness and die. He tells this through an interior monologue of high literary quality that bears the stamp of the author's fragmented narrative style. Anarchic and experimental, unpredictable and dreamlike, metaliterary and absurd, Gospodinov does not write a novel about death, nor about a canonical mourning, but about the pain of witnessing the end of a life. Starting from the personal anecdote—which makes it clear that when it happens through language, it ceases to belong to us and becomes part of the realm of fiction—the author also offers a chronicle of a generation, that of Bulgarian men born at the end of the Second World War.