After Orbán’s defeat, Bulgaria May Give Putin a New EU Foothold

Hungarians just threw out Putin’s man in Europe, but Bulgarians may install his replacement. Make us preferred on Google Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Pedestrians walk past an electoral billboard of the Progressive Bulgaria coalition’s leader and former President Rumen Radev in Sofia on April 17, 2026. Nikolay DOYCHINOV / AFP Content Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Flip Make us preferred on Google If the polls hold, Sunday’s general election in Sofia will deliver a victory to Rumen Radev, the former president whose nine years in office were defined by his opposition to weapons for Ukraine, his hostility toward EU sanctions on Russia, and his attempts to slow Bulgaria’s entry into the eurozone.   A government built around Radev would likely end Bulgarian ammunition flows to Kyiv, weaken Bulgaria’s diversification away from Russian gas, and hand the EU a new sanctions blocker days after ridding itself of its old one.   Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official . Described by some analysts as a “moderate Orbán,” he would be a downgrade for the Kremlin. But Bulgaria matters in ways Hungary doesn’t. It sits on NATO’s Black Sea flank and astride Balkan Stream, the onshore extension of TurkStream, the last working Russian gas pipeline into the EU.  A protest wave that wanted reform  The election is happening because the previous government collapsed last December under the weight of the largest street demonstrations Bulgaria has seen since the fall of communism.   The trigger was the 2026 budget, the first denominated in euros, Bulgaria’s official currency since January, which raised social-security contributions and taxes while leaving teachers and nurses with salary rises that did not cover inflation.  Roughly 150,000 people gathered in more than 25 cities on Dec. 10 to protest, with lasers projecting “Mafia Out” onto the parliament façade.   Other Topics of Interest General Staff Confirms Successful Strikes on Four Major Russian Oil Facilities Ukrainian forces targeted key refineries and terminals in the Samara, Leningrad, and Krasnodar regions overnight, aiming to disrupt the logistics of the Russian occupation army. The Rosen Zhelyazkov government, a center-right establishment coalition in office for barely a year, resigned the following morning, minutes before a no-confidence vote it would probably have lost.   President Rumen Radev resigned a month later in January, the first Bulgarian head of state to leave office voluntarily in the post-communist era and announced he would lead a new vehicle into the snap election.   This is the eighth Bulgarian election in five years, and the protests that demanded an end to oligarch meddling look set to deliver a winner whose anti-corruption platform comes wrapped in the most Russia-friendly foreign policy of any serious contender.  Fighter pilot turned politician  Radev built his political brand from the cockpit. Before he ran for president in 2016, the Bulgarian Air Force’s PR department promoted his loop-the-loops at high-profile air shows.  He served two presidential terms after winning office in 2017 with the backing of the Bulgarian Socialist Party, the post-communist successor party, and built his anti-corruption credentials during the 2020 protests, when prosecutors raided the presidential offices and briefly detained two of his staff.   Radev is now testing how far Bulgaria can lean toward Moscow without losing the EU and NATO. Dimitar Bechev of Carnegie Europe notes that Radev’s face is “everywhere, which is probably what matters” because nobody else on his party list is recognizable.  What the Russia question actually looks like  Radev’s Russia positions are well documented. He threatened to use Bulgaria’s veto against EU sanctions on Rosatom, the Russian nuclear corporation, if they threaten national energy interests.   He blocked a Bulgarian government order of artillery shells for Ukraine, called pro-Ukrainian legislators “warmongers” in December 2022, and skipped the NATO Washington summit in July 2024 over what he claimed was inadequate consultation.   In May 2024, when Sofia hosted the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Radev traveled to Budapest to meet Orbán instead.   He has given two interviews during the current campaign, one to public broadcaster BNT and one to a YouTube channel known for spreading pro-Russian disinformation.   Ruslan Stefanov of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia argues that calling Radev outright pro-Russian goes too far but acknowledges that his positions make him “politically useful to the Kremlin.”   A better comparison may not therefore be Orbán but Robert Fico in Slovakia, a left-populist who erodes EU consensus from within without formally breaking with it.  A vague campaign with a split electorate  Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria, a center-left vehicle launched only in March around three small social-democratic parties and a roster of his presidential loyalists, is polling between 30 and 34%. It sits well ahead of GERB, the center-right party of three-time former prime minister Boyko Borissov, which has dominated Bulgarian politics since 2009, on 19 to 21%.  Behind them, the reformist, pro-European We Continue the Change-Democratic Bulgaria (PP-DB) coalition is on 11-12%.   Delyan Peevski’s Movement for Rights and Freedoms-New Beginning, the kingmaker party of the country’s most notorious oligarch, is at 9-10%, and the hard-Russophile, anti-NATO Vazrazhdane is at 6-8%.  Boryana Dimitrova, who runs the Alpha Research polling agency, notes that Radev’s electorate is “split almost evenly” between voters drawn to his anti-corruption message and voters who want a softer line on Russia, which is why he campaigns vaguely, refuses television debates, and keeps his statements ambiguous enough that voters hear what they want to hear.   Why corruption is winning the campaign  Bulgarians overwhelmingly tell pollsters that inflation is their biggest day-to-day worry, sharpened by January’s switch to the euro. The campaign itself, however, is being fought on corruption, the grievance Bulgarians believe their political class has refused to address for a decade and a half.   The country sits joint-bottom with Hungary in Transparency International’s EU corruption rankings. Boyko Borissov’s GERB has dominated Bulgarian politics since 2009, and across his three terms as prime minister, the party has been dogged by allegations of clientelism and rigged public procurement.   The 2020 protests that first made Radev’s national reputation were triggered by photographs of Borissov apparently asleep in a bedroom next to a handgun and stacks of euro banknotes.  The figure who has come to personify the system, however, is Delyan Peevski, the oligarch sanctioned by both the United States and the United Kingdom under the Magnitsky framework for bribery and influence peddling, with control reaching deep into the prosecution service, regulatory bodies, and a substantial slice of the country’s media.   The Zhelyazkov government that fell in December had been kept alive since April 2025 by Peevski’s parliamentary votes, a fact most Bulgarians read as proof that the formally pro-European government was a front for the captured state Peevski has built around himself and Borissov.  Four scenarios sit on the table for the morning after. A Radev government with pro-European PP-DB would clear 125 to 140 seats and look mathematically clean, but PP-DB is emphatically pro-Ukraine and would struggle to share a cabinet with a man who blocked weapons shipments.   A Radev minority leaning on Peevski’s Turkish-Muslim minority DPS-New Beginning would be politically toxic and would mock the protests that produced this election.   A grand coalition of GERB and PP-DB is what Brussels would quietly prefer, and it is also vanishingly unlikely.   A ninth election, after Bulgaria’s standard process of three failed mandate attempts, is genuinely possible.   What sits behind all of these permutations is that Bulgarian politics has not produced a government capable of veto-strength obstruction in five years, and there is little reason this election will end that pattern.   Bulgarian instability is itself an insulation against Bulgarian Putinism, but it is also a kind of Russian asset, because a captured and paralyzed state is exactly what Moscow can work with.   The stakes when the polls close  The question is not really whether Radev is the next Orbán. He isn’t, and he can’t be. The Hungarian prime minister had sixteen years and four parliamentary supermajorities to capture his country’s institutions, and Radev would walk into office with a brand-new party, a coalition dependent on partners who don’t trust him, and the full glare of EU accountability mechanisms that Orbán long ago learned to deflect.   The question is whether a NATO Black Sea anchor with the EU’s worst corruption ranking and the bloc’s only currently working major Russian gas pipeline can govern itself coherently enough to be a useful ally or whether it becomes a serious obstacle.  See the original report from Stuart Dowell here.