In Sofia, on Friday, the masks finally came off. Bulgaria has officially moved into Russia’s camp. How did it get there? It all started with a government crisis. Which turned into a political one. Which lasted five years. Does that send a chill down your spine? It should. Because Romania’s political crisis is, step by step, following the exact same tracks.
Bulgaria went through eight rounds of parliamentary elections between April 2021 and April 2026. Seven of the eight were snap elections. April 2021, July 2021, November 2021. Then October 2022. Then April 2023, June 2024, October 2024. And, finally, April 2026. None of the parliaments born out of this electoral litany ever finished its term.
In five years, only three governments received a proper parliamentary vote of confidence. Kiril Petkov, the Harvard graduate who promised to root out corruption, lasted six months: installed in December 2021, brought down in June 2022 by the first no-confidence motion ever to pass in post-communist Bulgaria.
A year of caretaker governments followed, plus two more rounds of elections, until GERB and the PP-DB reformists — deadly enemies until the day before — cobbled together a formula in June 2023 that the Sofia press nicknamed “sglobka.” The word roughly means “makeshift arrangement,” and that says it all. The deal called for a rotation of prime ministers. When the rotation moment came, in March 2024, the whole construction blew up.
The third government, led by Rosen Zhelyazkov, appeared only in January 2025, after two more elections and nearly three months of haggling. A minority cabinet, kept alive week by week, that swallowed six no-confidence motions in eleven months. It didn’t fall on the seventh. It was brought down by the streets: on the evening of December 10, 2025, more than 150,000 people filled central Sofia, with protests in twenty other cities and in the diaspora. The next day, Zhelyazkov handed in his resignation.
What happened in between? Caretaker cabinets. Technocrats appointed by the president, voted in by no one, who could not — constitutionally or politically — do anything more than keep the administration afloat.
What five years of political and administrative chaos left behind shows up most clearly in three numbers. Voter turnout: 34 percent in June 2024, the absolute low since the fall of communism. The price of a vote: 500 leva apiece, at the October 2024 poll — the seventh in three and a half years, by which point elections had become, for part of the electorate, a small seasonal business. And the score of the pro-Russian extremists of Vazrazhdane, which climbed steadily, election after election, while oligarch Delian Peevski, under American sanctions for corruption, settled into the role of shadow arbiter of any majority.
But perhaps the most convincing argument is the economic one. Bulgaria had 6.17 billion euros allocated from the European recovery plan. It received the first tranche, 1.37 billion, in December 2022. The next payment did not arrive until November 2025. Three years later. The request could not even be filed before the end of 2023, because caretaker governments had no mandate to carry out the reforms Brussels demanded; and when the money finally arrived, the tranche had been cut from 653 to 438.6 million, a penalty for eight missed milestones, most of them tied to anti-corruption.
By the end of 2025, Bulgaria had absorbed only 53% of the available recovery funds, below the European average. Foreign direct investment? Down almost 55% in a single year: 1.49 billion euros in 2024, or 1.5% of GDP, compared with 3.5% a year earlier. Nobody bets on a country that doesn’t know who will be running it in three months. Analysts at ING found the phrase that sums it all up: “an economy on autopilot reaching its limits.” Even joining the euro, the great national project, originally scheduled for 2024, dragged on until January 1, 2026. Bulgaria entered the eurozone with a caretaker government and protesters in the streets.
And now, the mirror. On May 5, the Bolojan government fell to a no-confidence vote with 281 votes, matching the record set against the Cîțu government for the largest number of votes ever gathered against a Romanian government in Parliament. The Social Democrats (PSD) and the far-right AUR voted together, each for its own reasons. The coalition broke over something Bulgarians know by heart: the Social Democrats accepted the alliance but not the prime minister; the Liberals refused to abandon their prime minister. We’ve had a caretaker government with limited powers ever since. The most recent attempt to break the deadlock, the Adrian Veștea cabinet, ended embarrassingly on June 22: 189 votes out of the 233 needed, after AUR walked out of the chamber right before the vote. On July 1, Parliament blithely went on recess. Negotiations are “suspended for two weeks.” Maybe there will be an extraordinary session for the EU recovery-plan projects. Maybe.
North of the Danube, it looks like the same drama that began in the south five years ago is now starting. Parties that cannot build majorities but bring down governments with exuberant ease. Negotiations navigate between the red lines of personal animosities and fail because those turn out stronger than the red lines of parliamentary arithmetic.
Meanwhile, the extremists have discovered they don’t need to win elections to decide the fate of governments; it’s enough to lure the naive and then leave them out to dry by walking out of the chamber at just the right moment. All under the eyes of a president who rules out early elections and promises a government “within a reasonable time,” even though it’s obvious he has no control whatsoever over that timeline, which keeps stretching. Today’s Romania is playing out, scene by scene, act one of the Bulgarian play.
The lesson of the years our neighbors wasted carries the most serious warnings for all the political actors still indulging their vanity. The risk that the Social Democrats disappear entirely is quite real, while the reformist forces have no reason to celebrate their rise in the polls either. They may be rising in vain, because if they don’t reach 50% they still won’t have anyone with whom to form a government capable of passing a vote in Parliament. Just as the Bulgarian reformists couldn’t either. So their increasingly urgent desire to push the crisis toward early elections might not do them any good at all. On the contrary, it would be a second step, perhaps the decisive one, toward repeating the Bulgarian scenario.
Which could end up costing us far more than it cost our neighbors. Because we’re in a worse economic position. We don’t have the time Sofia had to run its economy into the ground without catastrophic consequences.
Standard & Poor’s reconfirmed our BBB-minus rating with a negative outlook in May — the last rung before junk — and stated the reason bluntly: the political crisis. The deficit is suffocating, and continuing to receive European funds, the only real safety net, requires a government with full powers. Not one that does nothing more than keep the lights on.
The epilogue of the Bulgarian story should scare us the most. The crisis ended a few months ago, but not to the liking of the pro-Western camp. In April 2026, former president Rumen Radev, with a personal party founded just months earlier, took 44% of the vote and 131 of 240 seats. An absolute majority. The Socialists were left outside parliament for the first time. An electorate exhausted by chaos didn’t vote for moderation. It voted for the man who promised to end the chaos.
And who actually won? The answer came on Friday, from the floor of the Bulgarian parliament. Prime Minister Radev announced that Bulgaria will oppose the 21st sanctions package the European Union is preparing against Russia. “I will take this step because I am protecting and defending Bulgaria’s national interest,” he said.
For five years, the Kremlin had nothing to do in Bulgaria. It waited. Bulgarian democracy ground itself down on its own, and in the end a NATO country, an EU member, freshly inside the eurozone, willingly took the empty seat left after Orbán lost Hungary and joined Fico’s Slovakia in the club of Moscow-friendly obstructionists blocking European policy.
If anyone thinks the scenario couldn’t work north of the Danube too, it means they haven’t looked at the opinion polls in a while. A long string of early elections would have exactly one beneficiary, and it isn’t any pro-European party. AUR doesn’t have to prove anything; it’s enough for it to point a finger at the chaos created by everyone else. And a prime minister who takes office at Victoria Palace, Romania’s seat of government, on the wave of collective exhaustion would, sooner or later, say in Brussels the very same words — that “the national interest” requires us not to sanction Russia. Just as “the national interest” already required them to vote against the law authorizing the Romanian army to shoot down Russian drones.
If Bulgaria’s ordeal hasn’t turned into a continental crisis by now, it isn’t because Sofia’s politicians didn’t try hard enough. It’s because our neighboring country simply isn’t as important to Europe’s and NATO’s security architecture. Romania is different. We sit on NATO’s border with Ukraine. We share the Black Sea border with Russia. At Deveselu, we host the missile defence shield, an essential piece of the US and NATO defence mechanisms. A Romania turned toward Moscow would no longer be just a regional problem, but one for the entire continent.
Fortunately, we aren’t there yet. We’re sleepwalking along the edge of the spiral, but we haven’t slipped into it. The parliamentary arithmetic still allows for a comfortable pro-European majority. What’s missing isn’t the arithmetic, it’s a grain of clarity — the understanding that no prime minister, no ministerial portfolio, and no internal score-settling is worth what Bulgaria paid: five years of blind political fighting, eight rounds of elections, billions blocked or lost, investors chased away, a democracy unplugged. On top of that, we could squander the last great asset we still have — the consistency of our pro-Western positioning. All of it “in the name of the national interest.” The national interest of the foreign power that waited, watched, and stands ready to reap the rewards of our own foolishness.
The Bulgarians had no one else’s mistakes to learn from. We do. Repeating them blindly would be a historic-scale mistake.