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Bulgaria’s seventh parliamentary election in less than four years appears to have failed to unblock a political impasse that has deprived the country of a stable government since 2020 and made Balkan politics more unpredictable during Russia’s war on nearby Ukraine.
The centre-right Gerb party of former premier Boyko Borisov remains the biggest, based on a nearly complete vote count on Monday morning, but with only a 26 per cent share of the vote it again fell short of an overall majority.
The result is broadly in line with opinion polls and is little changed from Gerb’s tally in several recent elections, all of which ended without a stable governing majority in parliament.
Gerb’s rivals, the liberal former ruling party We Continue the Change (PP), received around 14 per cent, while the pro-Russian nationalist party Revival won 13 per cent. Gerb would almost certainly be unable to cobble together a coalition with either party, analysts said.
“We have made a commitment to form a government,” Borisov told a news conference late on Sunday, a change from the previous election when he passed up the opportunity to govern immediately after the vote.
He said his party would not discuss anything except a course of action based on its own programme. “The voice of the people is the voice of God . . . there is no way we will supplant the people’s vote.”
Under Bulgarian law, president Rumen Radev, a pro-Russian former general, will first ask Gerb to assemble a coalition, with two further attempts for other parties if that option fails. Because both Gerb and PP ruled out working with Revival, the maths could be difficult.
“Two parties are not enough,” Boryana Dimitrova, managing partner at Alpha Research, told national television. “They will have to look for [more]. The question is which.”
Fragmentation continued, making coalition building even more complex. The former number two of Bulgarian politics, an ethnic Turkish party, split in July, with its successors reaching 11 and 7 per cent. And two smaller anti-establishment, pro-Russian groups will enter Parliament, with just over the 4 per cent mandatory threshold.
“This result is less terrible than some of us may have thought,” said Vessela Tcherneva, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Sofia. “Bulgarians realised they are at a critical juncture for democracy . . . So now the pro-Russian vote [counts for less].”
Analysts said Borisov would probably not compromise over his agenda with possible coalition partners — including liberals, socialists and Turks — for fear of risking his own traditional support.
“[Borisov] stands to lose too much,” said Goran Georgiev, an analyst with the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy (CSD). “His whole image was built upon criticising and condemning [Bulgaria’s] socialist past and the actors that came out of it.”
Since anti-corruption demonstrations led to the collapse of Gerb’s majority in 2020, the Balkan nation of 6.5mn people has failed to find a lasting political balance.
Dimitar Bechev, a senior fellow at think-tank Carnegie Europe said that the last time Gerb managed to govern for a spell alongside the reformists, the administration ended up falling apart in what he described as a “bruising experience”.
The dysfunction has prevented Bulgaria from undertaking economic and rule-of-law reforms to gain membership of the Eurozone currency union, which supporters say would boost economic growth and strengthen the country’s anti-corruption drive.
Swift accession to the EU’s border-free Schengen zone, originally planned for the coming months, has also been thrown into doubt, although the country joined the area for air and maritime travel — not for land frontiers — earlier this year.
Several pro-Russian parties have gained popularity, notably Revival, whose leader Kostadin Kostadinov has openly campaigned on an anti-western platform. Two upstart populist movements, Greatness and Morality, Unity, Honour, each a hair above the 4 per cent threshold, have also adopted the Kremlin’s position on ending the war in Ukraine.
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