The Caretaker Republic: How Bulgaria Learned to Govern Without Governing

Bulgaria has a constitution, a parliament, and a president. What it has struggled to maintain, with remarkable consistency over the past decade, is an actual functioning government. Since 2021 alone, the country has cycled through five caretaker cabinets, two of them led by the same man. By the time Andrey Gyurov was sworn in as the twelfth caretaker prime minister in Bulgarian democratic history in February 2026, the caretaker government had stopped being an emergency measure and started feeling like the default mode of the Bulgarian state.

A Constitutional Tool, Overused to the Point of Absurdity

The caretaker government was never designed to be a regular feature of political life. Under the Bulgarian constitution, it exists for one purpose: to keep the lights on and organise fair elections when a regular cabinet cannot be formed or has collapsed. It is, by definition, a stopgap. And yet between 2021 and 2026, Bulgaria spent more time under caretaker governance than under elected cabinets. Stefan Yanev ruled twice in 2021. Galab Donev ruled for a combined 308 days across two terms in 2022-2023 - the longest caretaker premiership in Bulgarian history. Dimitar Glavchev followed with another 282 days across two consecutive caretaker terms in 2024-2025. Three men, six caretaker mandates, nearly three years of democratic limbo.

For context: in the entire period from 2002 to 2017, Bulgaria had just two caretaker governments. President Georgi Parvanov, who served two full terms, appointed only two caretaker prime ministers in ten years. His successor Rosen Plevneliev appointed one. Rumen Radev, who served two terms from 2017 to 2025, appointed seven. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidental.

The Radev Factor

Radev came to the presidency in 2016 as an outsider, a former air force general with no party affiliation, riding a wave of anti-establishment sentiment. He was, from the beginning, in an adversarial relationship with the parliamentary majority - and particularly with GERB and its leader Boyko Borissov. Under the Bulgarian constitution, a president with a hostile parliament has limited formal powers but one significant weapon: the caretaker government. When coalitions fail, it is the president who appoints the caretaker prime minister, sets their mandate, and determines the timing of the next election.

Further reading: NATO Pilot, Putin Sympathizer, or Something Else? Who Is Rumen Radev and Why Did He Just Blow Up Bulgarian Politics

Critics, including legal scholars and former parliamentarians, have argued that Radev wielded this power not merely as a constitutional duty but as a political instrument, using caretaker governments to extend his influence over the executive branch during periods when elected governments were his opponents. The caretaker cabinets were, as one analyst bluntly put it, "an instrument of the president's manual rule of the country." Whether one accepts that framing or not, the result was the same: years of paralysis, broken budgets, and a political culture in which no party felt sufficient pressure to compromise and form a stable coalition, knowing that the caretaker reset button was always available.

Now, in an extraordinary turn, Radev himself stepped down from the presidency and entering parliamentary politics directly, seeking elected office and, presumably, executive influence through the front door rather than the side entrance. It is a remarkable admission, implicit but unmistakable, that eight years of presidency-as-opposition had its limits.

Borissov, Peevski, and the Coalition That Couldn't

The caretaker cycle did not happen in a vacuum. It was sustained by a deeper dysfunction in Bulgarian party politics, embodied by two figures whose influence has proven far more durable than any cabinet: Boyko Borissov and Delyan Peevski.

Borissov's GERB has won or placed first in virtually every election since 2009, yet has repeatedly failed to translate electoral dominance into stable governance. His first government fell to street protests in 2013. His second resigned after losing the presidential election to Radev in 2016. His third survived almost a full term despite major protests in 2020, only to be followed by years of political fragmentation in which GERB could win elections but not govern alone. The Zhelyazkov cabinet, GERB's most recent attempt at coalition governance, lasted 399 days before mass protests over a bloated, unworkable budget forced its resignation in December 2025.

Media mogul and controversial oligarch Delyan Peevski, meanwhile, represents a different but equally destabilising force. His political movement, formerly part of the original Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), then splintering into DPS-New Beginning, has acted as a kingmaker across multiple governments, providing or withdrawing support in ways that repeatedly upended coalition arithmetic. It was Peevski's perceived grip on the Zhelyazkov cabinet that triggered the withdrawal of the rival APS (original DPS faction), tipping the government into minority status. The protests that eventually brought Zhelyazkov down were directed as much at Peevski and Borissov personally as at any specific policy.

A Deeper Crisis

What the numbers ultimately reveal is not a failure of any one president, party, or prime minister, but a structural crisis of democratic trust. By 2022, Bulgaria already trailed only the Netherlands and Belgium in the number of caretaker governments since World War II - two countries hardly celebrated for their own political stability. Since then, Bulgaria has been busy widening the gap. But unlike Belgium, which has occasionally set world records for government formation negotiations while keeping the state broadly functional, Bulgaria's caretaker periods have often coincided with delayed EU funding, unresolved crises like wildfires, water shortages, corruption, and a creeping normalisation of impermanence.

When no government expects to last, none governs as if it must. Projects are delayed, reforms are deferred, and budgets are designed for optics rather than sustainability. The Zhelyazkov cabinet's 2026 budget - so unrealistic that employers refused to endorse it and unions walked out of consultations - was the logical endpoint of years of governance where short-term political survival mattered more than long-term policy.

The upcoming early elections of April 19, 2026 offer, as every Bulgarian election in recent memory has offered, the possibility of a reset. Whether the country's parties can finally assemble a coalition built to last, or whether Andrey Gyurov will simply be handing the caretaker keys to his successor in another year's time, remains the central question of Bulgarian democracy and has been, with depressing consistency, for the better part of a decade.