Bulgarian voters head to the polls on Sunday with Rumen Radev’s newly formed nationalist Progressive Bulgaria party, leading by a wide margin in the country’s seventh snap election since 2021.
Radev, a former air force chief and current Bulgarian president, blends sovereignty-first politics with selective opposition to EU policies.
He said Sofia will neither block EU support nor contribute financially, while rejecting the caretaker government’s ten-year defence agreement with Kyiv as lacking electoral legitimacy.
In the campaign’s final hours on Friday, he told bTV that the statement “Crimea is Russian” is a “realistic position, not pro-Russian,” which is directly at odds with the EU’s long-standing stance on Ukraine’s territorial integrity since 2014.
He has previously dismissed the EU’s Green Deal as naive, sought a referendum to block the adoption of the euro, and resisted lifting the country’s veto on North Macedonia’s EU accession.
Coalition…
