How Bulgaria is governed when its parliament cannot govern

Where the constitution came from

The Treaty of Berlin, signed on 13 July 1878, created a small Bulgarian principality between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains and instructed it to elect an assembly of notables at Tarnovo to prepare a constitution and choose a prince. That assembly convened in February 1879. The Liberal Party, led by Dragan Tsankov, Petko Karavelov and Petko Slaveikov, dominated it and produced a document with three features that the country has kept ever since: a single National Assembly, elected by universal male suffrage, with guarantees of civil rights and strict limits on the power of the head of state.

The limits did not hold. Prince Alexander of Battenberg disliked the arrangement, and in 1881 rigged elections produced a Grand National Assembly that suspended the constitution and invested the prince with absolute power for seven years. A period of rule by Russian generals followed. Alexander restored the constitution in September 1883 and accepted a coalition government. In 1911 a Grand National Assembly amended the text again, granting the monarch the title of tsar and the right to conclude treaties with foreign states without the National Assembly's consent.

The document written after 1989 restated the same design. The former communist party was restructured as the Bulgarian Socialist Party and won the 1990 elections to a Constitutional Assembly with a small majority; that assembly elected Zhelyu Zhelev, a communist-era dissident from the Union of Democratic Forces, as president in the same year. The constitution the assembly produced was in force for the parliamentary elections of October 1991. One chamber, universal suffrage from the age of 18, a head of state with a short list of duties, and the whole weight of government resting on whether the chamber can agree. The rest of the country's institutional story follows from Bulgaria: history, and the arrangement has been tested harder since 2021 than at any point since it was written.

What the National Assembly is for

The National Assembly, the Narodno Sabranie, seats 240 deputies elected for four-year terms by direct popular vote. It enacts laws, approves the budget, schedules presidential elections, selects and dismisses the prime minister and the other ministers, declares war, authorises the deployment of troops abroad, and ratifies international treaties and agreements. The prime minister is head of government and holds the most consequential executive position in the system.

The presidency is the counterweight, and it is a light one. The president is directly elected for a five-year term with the right to one re-election, is head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces, schedules elections and referendums, represents the country abroad, concludes international treaties and heads the Consultative Council for National Security. The one legislative instrument the office holds is the power to return a bill to the National Assembly for further debate. The chamber can pass the same text a second time and the objection falls.

Direct democracy exists on paper alongside both. The constitution provides for petitions and for national referendums, and elections are supervised by an independent Central Election Commission whose membership includes all the major parties. A party has to register with the commission before it can contest a national election. By convention the prime minister designate is the leader of the party that won the most votes, though the research record of the past two decades shows how often that convention has been set aside.

How Bulgarians actually elect their deputies

Deputies are chosen from party or coalition lists submitted in each of the country's 28 administrative divisions, and a party or coalition has to reach 4% of the national vote to enter parliament at all. There is no single national list and no single-member seat. A list that runs strongly in one province and nowhere else clears nothing. The threshold does visible work. In the general election of April 2026 the largest party took 44.6% of the vote and 131 of the 240 seats, an absolute majority, while three separate parties finished on 3.2, 3.1 and 3.0% and elected nobody at all. Close to a tenth of the ballots cast were held by parties that fell short of the bar by less than a percentage point each.

Turnout in that election slightly exceeded 50%, with the final exit-poll estimates ranging from 48.0 to 51.3%. That is high by recent standards: the presidential election of November 2021 was decided on a turnout of 34%. Fragmentation has been the other constant. The election of 2016 put eight parties into the chamber, the first time since competitive elections began in 1990 that more than seven had entered at once, and every parliament seated between 2021 and 2024 held at least five.

Why governments here end in the street

Bulgarian cabinets have rarely been ended by the procedure designed to end them. They have been ended by demonstrations. The centre-right GERB government elected in 2009 resigned in February 2013, months before its term expired, after nationwide protests over living standards, corruption and what protesters described as the failure of the democratic system.

Its replacement fared no better. The Bulgarian Socialist Party, which won the snap election that followed, chose the non-party former finance minister Plamen Oresharski to form a cabinet. Protests began within two weeks of the government taking office, some drawing more than 11,000 participants, triggered in part by the appointment of a media proprietor to head the National Security State Agency. The demonstrations ran for the life of the government. It survived five votes of no confidence and then resigned in July 2014 anyway.

The pattern repeated in 2020, when police and prosecutors raided the presidency in July as part of a long-running conflict between the prime minister and the head of state, setting off months of protest that preceded GERB's weakest result to date at the regular election of April 2021. It repeated again in December 2025, when the minority government seated in January of that year resigned after weeks of demonstrations against the budget for the following year and against corruption in the administration.

One cabinet did fall the constitutional way. The coalition formed in December 2021 lost a vote of no confidence on 22 June 2022 and left office. It is the exception that makes the rule legible.

The external assessments record the same unease in colder language. Freedom House listed the country as free in 2020, with scores of 33 for political rights and 45 for civil liberties, while reporting a continuing deterioration in democratic governance after 2009 that it attributed to reduced media independence, stalled reforms, abuse of authority at senior levels and the growing dependence of local administrations on the centre. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated the country a flawed democracy in 2022. A 2018 survey by the Institute for Economics and Peace found that fewer than 15% of respondents considered elections to be fair.

What happens when nobody forms a cabinet

This is the clause that has done the most work. When a parliament cannot seat a government, the president distributes exploratory mandates: one to the largest party, one to another, and a third to a party of the head of state's own choosing. If all three are returned or refused, Article 98 of the constitution allows the president to appoint a caretaker prime minister, approve the composition of that cabinet, and schedule a new election.

The sequence of March 2024 shows it working end to end. A rotation agreement between the two largest blocs, under which the premiership was to change hands after nine months, collapsed on 20 March 2024. GERB then rejected the chance to form a government, the second bloc made a limited attempt, and the final mandate, chosen by the president, went to a party that refused it immediately. On 29 March the president invoked Article 98 and named the chairman of the National Audit Office as candidate for caretaker prime minister, with one week to propose a cabinet. The proposal arrived on 5 April, the election was set for 9 June, and the National Assembly inaugurated the caretaker cabinet on 9 April 2024.

That was the fourth such appointment in three years. A caretaker cabinet governed between the elections of April and July 2021, another was appointed after the no-confidence vote of June 2022, and another took office on 18 February 2026 to run the election called for 19 April. None of them was chosen by voters or confirmed by a majority, and none of them was confined to housekeeping: the cabinet appointed in February 2026 asked the European Union for help against interference in the coming election, warning that foreign actors were attempting to shape opinion through social media networks and propaganda websites.

The mechanism is older than the crisis it has been used for. The president dissolved the government and appointed a provisional one in 1994, before the December elections of that year, and appointed another caretaker cabinet in 1997 during the economic collapse, ahead of the April election that followed. What changed after 2021 is frequency. The election of April 2023 was the fifth held since April 2021, and the snap election of 27 October 2024 was described at the time as the sixth. In between, the parliament seated in November 2024 needed eleven rounds of voting before it could elect a speaker on 6 December, and the first exploratory mandate of that parliament was not handed over until 15 January 2025.

Who decides what the constitution means

The Constitutional Court has twelve members, elected by the National Assembly by a two-thirds majority and serving nine-year terms. It reviews the constitutionality of laws and statutes brought before it, and whether those laws comply with the international treaties the state has signed. That second function turned out to matter more than the first. When the head of state sought to delay adoption of the euro by calling a referendum, the attempt ran into a ruling the court had already issued in 2024, holding that the country was obliged to adopt the currency under the treaties ratified on accession to the European Union. The speaker of the National Assembly rejected the referendum proposal and the Constitutional Court upheld that rejection. A twelve-member bench, and not the presidency or the chamber, settled the largest economic question the country had faced in a decade.

The ordinary courts run in parallel. Regional, district and appeal courts sit below a Supreme Court of Cassation and a Supreme Administrative Court, with a Specialized Criminal Court and a system of military courts alongside. The Supreme Judicial Council administers the judiciary and appoints judges. By a two-thirds majority of its full membership it elects the presidents of the two supreme courts and the Prosecutor General from among its own members, and the president of the republic then appoints those elected.

The system is a civil law system, and it is overseen administratively by the Ministry of Justice. Domestic and international observers have criticised it consistently for a lack of transparency and for corruption, and judicial reform has been on the agenda of governments since accession negotiations began. The Prosecutor General, elected by a body that partly elects itself and appointed by a president with no power to refuse, is the office where that argument concentrates.

How power is shared with the provinces

The country is a unitary state, and the map of its internal divisions has been redrawn repeatedly. Since the 1880s the number of territorial management units has moved between seven and 26. Between 1987 and 1999 there were nine provinces. The structure adopted at the end of that period, in parallel with the decentralisation of the economy, established 27 provinces plus the metropolitan capital province of Sofia City, each named after its own capital town, and divided them into 265 municipalities.

Only the lower tier is elected. Municipalities are run by mayors chosen for four-year terms and by directly elected municipal councils. Provincial governors are appointed by the Council of Ministers, and both provinces and municipalities depend heavily on central funding, which makes the state a highly centralised one in practice as well as in law. The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it closes the circle. The 28 divisions that serve as the constituencies for National Assembly elections have no elected government of their own, and their governors are appointed by the cabinet that the National Assembly seats. The territorial map organises the vote without holding any power that the vote could redistribute.

Which alliances Bulgaria has signed into

Membership of the United Nations dates from 14 December 1955, and the country has sat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council three times, most recently in the 2002 to 2003 term. It was among the founding participants of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 1975. Euro-Atlantic integration became the organising aim of foreign policy after 1989, although even the communist leadership had entertained aspirations of leaving the Warsaw Pact and joining the European Communities by 1987.

Council of Europe membership followed on 7 May 1992, the Francophonie in 1993 and the World Trade Organization on 1 December 1996. The first foreign troops on Bulgarian soil since the Second World War arrived in 2001, when the country hosted six KC-135 tanker aircraft and 200 support personnel for operations in Afghanistan. NATO accession came on 29 March 2004, followed by a defence cooperation agreement with the United States in April 2006 under which the air bases at Bezmer and Graf Ignatievo, the Novo Selo training range and a logistics centre at Aytos became jointly used training facilities. The accession treaty with the European Union was signed on 25 April 2005 and membership took effect on 1 January 2007. The record dates Schengen membership from 31 March 2024, and full admission to the area followed on 1 January 2025. Entry to the eurozone was set for 2026, with the last legal hurdles cleared in 2025, and the euro is the currency the record now carries.

Regional relations run alongside the treaties. There is a tripartite economic and diplomatic arrangement with Romania and Greece, working ties with China and Vietnam, and a long historical relationship with Russia that the past few years have strained. The country assisted Ukraine after the invasion of 2022, and in 2023, after Gazprom stopped exporting gas to it, stopped importing Russian oil and gas in return.

What the new majority inherits

The general election of April 2026 ended the deadlock by arithmetic. An absolute majority of 131 seats in a 240-seat chamber is something no single party had held since 1997, when the Union of Democratic Forces won 137 seats and formed the first post-communist government to serve out its full term. Exit polling by Alpha Research found the winning party ahead in every age group, including voters aged 18 to 30, a cohort that had become more politically engaged during the anti-establishment protests of late 2025.

What a majority does not do is repeal the conditions that produced five years of caretaker rule. The provinces remain financed from Sofia and governed by appointees. The Supreme Judicial Council still elects the officials that the presidency then appoints. Media independence and the conduct of prosecutions remain the subjects that external monitors flag year after year, and the finding that fewer than 15% of respondents in 2018 thought elections fair describes a deficit that a single result does not close.

Article 98 stays where it is, unamended and available. The clause kept the ministries staffed through six national elections while the chamber failed to seat a government, and the same clause allowed a cabinet nobody had voted for to schedule the election that replaced it. Only a working parliamentary majority keeps such a provision dormant, and Bulgarian majorities have so far been short.