by MADLEN NIKOLOVA
Bulgarians will go to the polls for the eighth time in five years later this month, after a massive wave of protests brought down Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov’s right-wing coalition at the end of last year. Demonstrations broke out in November in response to the proposed 2026 budget, which sought to hike social security contributions and taxes, increase salaries for the police, defence agencies and judiciary while leaving rank-and-file administrative workers, teachers and hospital staff with pay rises hardly covering inflation. The budget was also the first to be denominated in euros, Bulgaria having been approved to join the Eurozone last year, which inflamed popular anxiety about inflation. The protests peaked on 10 December, when more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, with tens of thousands more turning out across almost all regional cities. The next day Zhelyazkov – having been in power for less than a year – announced his resignation on live television, minutes before a scheduled parliamentary vote of confidence.
The protests were lazily described as another ‘Gen Z revolt’ by the liberal media, while some on the left dismissed them as orchestrated by the opposition coalition, the centrist PP-DB. Yet they unleashed political energies that far transcended the nominal organizers: the PP-DB’s approval ratings are around 15 per cent; an estimated 71 per cent supported the protests. Surveys revealed, moreover, that they were not confined to angry youth. Many participants were middle-aged, animated by concerns for a dignified old age for their parents, affordable healthcare, education for their children, and profoundly distrustful about how the higher taxes – raised from wages already strained by inflation – would be spent given widespread corruption.
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