On April 19, parliamentary elections took place in Bulgaria for the eighth time in five years.

It was the latest iteration of a pattern that has crept inwards from the European Union’s eastern periphery, from Georgia in 2024 to Romania in 2025, to Slovenia and Hungary this year: foreign governments pick a favorite that suits their geopolitical objectives and/or culture war preferences. They then try to put the finger on the scale of the political contest, at the very least with alarmist rhetoric, but also through material interference.

Arguably, this pattern has left the region less secure, its democracies brittle and its populations alienated.

Refracted through such faraway geopolitical and ideological lenses, Rumen Radev, whose hastily assembled “Progressive Bulgaria” party won a majority of seats in parliament, is either a Russian agent and a Trojan horse for Vladimir Putin, or a stalwart sovereigntist and defender of Western civilization against open borders and the great replacement. Inevitably, these self-serving projections miss their mark.

All politics is local. Bulgaria’s political landscape features personalist parties that regularly splinter and merge, so the two previously largest political blocs each go by a blended name, like celebrity couples: the incumbent GERB and DPS parties are jointly known as Borissov-Peevski after their leaders, the former nicknamed “Teflon” for surviving multiple corruption scandals, the latter sanctioned by the U.S. and U.K. for corruption.

The other bloc, known as PP-DB, leads the caretaker government, uniting three liberal, vehemently pro-European parties that have made judicial reform their flagship issue. Most parties are on the center-right of the spectrum, mildly conservative on social matters, laissez-faire on the economy and social rights. Revival, a far-right nationalist party, compares roughly to far-right populists across Europe, but barely crossed the 4% hurdle to get into parliament.

A number of smaller parties did not make it. The election came after large-scale, Gen-Z-led protests caused a GERB-led government to resign in December 2025, paving the way for the PP-DB bloc’s brief stint in power.

In this context, Radev is not the far-right Orbanist foreign observers either warn of or cheer on, depending on their preferences. Unlike in Hungary and indeed much of Europe, immigration was rarely raised in his campaign or political career and isn’t much of an issue in a country that receives few migrants, though it has lost a third of its own population to emigration since the 1990s.

Radev, who served as Bulgaria’s president from 2017 until earlier this year, has called for Europe to start talking to Russia, but this hardly amounts to being “Putin’s proxy.” He trained at U.S. Air Force Squadron Officer School, obtained a master’s degree at the Air War College, and, as commander of Bulgaria’s air force, oversaw NATO interoperability. A former fighter pilot with the rank of general, his pragmatic approach to making peace with Russia may reflect a veteran’s wariness of war.

Radev is nominally from the center left, but in practice has come across as a “milquetoast neoliberal.” His electoral manifesto reads blandly centrist, as if written by AI.

Under the opportunistic gaze of foreign policy elites in Brussels, Berlin or Washington, Bulgaria’s elections were all about geopolitics, about the single-minded focus on the war with Russia. But while matters of war, peace, security, and Bulgaria’s place in the world played into voters’ decisions, they did so for reasons centered on their own lives and communities.

For example, how can strong majorities of Bulgarians support EU membership and yet vote for a candidate who has been portrayed as an EU-skeptic? Perhaps it is because the gains from EU membership have been distributed unequally, between the cities and the countryside, between the elites and average citizens.

Bulgaria is not just the poorest EU member state, but also its most unequal: it has the highest Gini coefficient by far. Outside the major cities, health, food and transportation deserts are spreading. While most available capital is invested in big cities, smaller municipalities are captured by political networks that offer poorly paid state jobs and, during election season, buy votes with firewood.

Small town mayors also form the first layer of pervasive corruption via rigged procurement. To spend time in small towns and support people in their struggle against corruption and environmental degradation is to hear of both their despair and their determination to secure a better future for themselves and their neighbors.

On Sunday, all parties hemorrhaged voters to Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria, as Bulgarians across generations and classes voted against the entire political establishment. During the campaign, the pro-European liberal bubble of diehard PP-DB supporters treated voters like the equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s basket of deplorables. They mocked them for voting for a “green sock” — a reference to the formerly uniformed officer Radev. They told the public not to believe their own eyes and wallets: “you’re not actually poor, because how could you be, if you are in the EU? You are imagining things. But if you are poor, it’s your own fault, you didn’t try hard enough.”

Similarly, Bulgarians feel gaslit by their political establishment about the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. On election day, a small town election official told RS it was “crazy that they’re asking us to believe that Israel is just defending itself, and that the war in Ukraine is all Russia’s fault, while we are paying higher gas prices and heating bills.”

Bulgarians see that the EU lifted stringent borrowing rules, but only for increasing defense spending, rather than for hospitals and reducing out-of-pocket healthcare costs, which are proportionally the highest in the EU. At the barber shop, people chat about how they are afraid of war, how it would be better to talk to Russia, how a shaky ceasefire won’t be enough to ensure Bulgaria’s prosperity.

In the final week before the election, the pro-European PP-DB bloc dialed up the performative political correctness of their campaign, asking the rhetorical question of “who does Crimea belong to?”, thus appearing oblivious to the everyday struggles of ordinary Bulgarians. This puzzling strategy apparently cost them yet more votes, which migrated to Radev and provided him with an absolute majority.

Bulgarians know instinctively that in a war, even a cold war, they will be the losers. They know it doesn’t make them pro-Russian to be against war — a war that would hurt them more than others, given their peripheral geography and NATO bases. They reject the false choice of having to be either pro-Europe or pro-peace.

On the downside, Radev’s politics may be scrupulously centrist, but hard to pin down, so that the electorate can project on him whatever they like. His victory is not so much due to any brilliance on his part as to the awfulness of the rest of the political establishment and the desire of large sections of the Bulgarian populace for fundamental changes.

Moreover, Radev’s purpose-built campaign vehicle, Progressive Bulgaria, may well contain the seeds of his project’s demise. The new party’s ranks filled quickly with defectors from the GERB and DPS parties, including many corrupt small town mayors. His campaign had plenty of funding to plaster posters virtually everywhere and rent offices in the best real estate all over the country, and it is an open secret that this support came from the oligarchs whose pernicious schemes provoked last winter’s protests and led to the lopsided election results.

Given his party’s absolute majority of seats in parliament, it will be difficult to hold the new government accountable.

In Brussels, no one seems to seriously expect Radev to block funding for Ukraine or to stop selling Ukraine weapons. Given the lack of details about how Radev plans to deliver on his promises, Bulgarian civil society will be well-advised to approach this government’s dedication to serve the public interest with skepticism and a readiness to mobilize to defend it.

Activists should expect the ongoing militarization to continue and that the minerals required for the EU’s defense industries will be extracted from protected areas. Brussels itself can be expected to lend a hand by relaxing environmental standards in order to “streamline” the approval process for controversial mining projects. The costs, such as the contamination of drinking water, will be paid by rural communities.

The risks are substantial. If Radev proves to be too beholden to corrupt networks to restore justice and unable to build coalitions in Europe to press for a pragmatic peace with Russia, the resulting disillusionment may offer fertile ground for a demagogue that deserves the name.