Rumen Radev, a Russia-aligned former president, looks on course to win Bulgaria’s election on Sunday, but will need to team up with other parties to form a governing majority.
Radev’s newly created Progressive Bulgaria movement was on track to secure just under 40 percent of the vote, according to exit polls broadcast on television. The polling agency Market Links predicted his party would win 38.9 percent, while Alpha Research put him on 37.5 percent.
That meant he had more than twice the support of any other party.
The key question is now whether he will seek to form a majority with pro-EU liberal reformists (on about 14 percent), or whether he will ally himself with the Socialist party (on about 4 percent) and nationalists (on about 5 percent), which could allow him to form a pro-Moscow governing bloc.
The election is the Balkan country’s eighth in five years — amid rolling political crises and fragile coalitions — and 62-year-old former air force commander Radev has been seeking to pull together a new political party to break the impasse.
Radev has established his political reputation by casting himself as an enemy of the country’s oligarchic “mafia state,” but his opponents argue his policies often align with the Kremlin’s, particularly on the war in Ukraine.
Radev has encouraged Ukraine to sue for peace, does not supporting sending arms to Kyiv and says his insistence that Crimea is “Russian” simply reflects a strategic reality. He is also a critic of Sofia’s accession to the euro this year, arguing the new currency has stoked inflation.
In his remarks after voting on Sunday morning, Radev said the election was an opportunity to “take back” the country from oligarchs, but also called for relations of “mutual respect” with Moscow, based on Russia’s role in liberating Bulgaria from the Ottoman empire in 1878.
While these positions have helped him build up a base of support at home, he has avoided direct confrontation with the West and has generally fallen in step with the European mainstream when attending European Council meetings in Brussels.
European funds are vital to the EU’s poorest member country and Bulgarian leaders have traditionally avoided any provocative antics in Brussels in the style of outgoing Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán.
In the days before the election, the former MiG-29 pilot pushed back against the accusations that he was pro-Russian.
“I don’t see what kind of pro-Russian position I have. I have completely pro-Bulgarian positions, I have pro-European positions,” he said.
He refuses to go to into coalition with Bulgaria’s two most prominent politicians — former Prime Minister Boyko Borissov and Delyan Peevski, leader of the DPS-New Beginning party — accusing them of being at the top of the “oligarchic pyramid” running the mafia state.
While casting his vote on Sunday, Borissov hit back by trying to associate Radev with a corruption probe in his close entourage.
This article is being updated.
