On 19 April, Bulgaria, held its eighth parliamentary election in five years, the most visible symptom of the institutional trench war that has engulfed the country. Former president Rumen Radev’s newly established party Progressive Bulgaria (PB) succeeded in defeating long-serving former prime minister Boyko Borisov at the ballot box. With 131 of the 240 seats in Bulgaria’s unicameral legislature, PB’s lead over Borisov’s GERB and power-broker Delyan Peevski’s DPS marks a seismic change in Bulgarian politics (Figure 1). These results have been read as an end to prolonged instability, corruption scandals, and oligarchic capture. However, foreign analysts keep misunderstanding Radev’s geopolitical orientation, portraying him as being ‘Russia’s candidate’ and seeking to pull Sofia back into Moscow’s orbit.
Indeed, Radev has been rather accommodating towards Moscow for a European leader. For instance, the European Commission rebutted his 2021 statement that Crimea was Russian. Moreover, he opposed attempts to provide Ukraine with Bulgarian military equipment. Radev further fueled such worries during the election campaign by arguing that Bulgaria should neither help Ukraine nor ‘foot the bill’ for its war effort.
However, the ‘Russia’s candidate’ label is too crude. After all, Radev is a former commander of the Bulgarian Air Force and a graduate of the US Air War College, where he completed a master’s degree in strategic studies. More importantly, PB’s own program does not call for neutrality, withdrawal from NATO, or a reversal of Bulgaria’s Euro-Atlantic orientation. On the contrary, it links safeguarding Bulgaria’s national interests with active participation in EU and NATO policymaking and a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine.
Hence, the pro-Western/pro-Russian binary that frames much international commentary on Radev is misleading. PB’s electoral success depended on avoiding grand narratives, allowing different segments of the electorate to read different policies in its program. Such ambiguity broadly mirrors Bulgarian public opinion: only a slim majority supports Bulgaria adherence to common EU positions, there is no consensus on NATO, and nearly half hold a positive view of Russia (Figure 2). Against this background, Radev would have struggled to convert his name recognition into a parliamentary majority had he framed the election as an unambiguous choice between Brussels and Moscow. Instead, his rhetoric and background suggest Radev is attempting to revive Bulgaria’s traditional posture: ‘always with Europe, never against Russia.’ In this election, Radev’s achievement was endowing this ‘two-chairs’ strategy with a clear electoral mandate.
But the Russia Concern Is Not Entirely Baseless…
Concerns about Radev’s pro-Russian positioning are not baseless. Euro-Atlanticists in Sofia first raised suspicions of Russian influence in 2016, when Radev first ran for president with the support of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). The controversy involved Leonid Reshetnikov, then director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, who had commissioned a study profiling a potentially successful presidential candidate. Reshetnikov later claimed he had discussed the study with BSP leader Korneliya Ninova, who acknowledged the meeting took place but denied coordinating Radev’s nomination with him.
Still, these fears fell on deaf ears in Brussels until after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, starting in 2022, Radev has repeatedly positioned himself against key elements of the EU’s anti-Russian consensus. In February 2023, he warned that Bulgaria would veto EU sanctions targeting Russian nuclear energy and opposed the donation of Bulgarian weapon systems to foreign armies. Then, in December 2023, he vetoed the ratification of an agreement to provide Ukraine with Bulgarian armored personnel carriers, emphasizing the need to prioritize Bulgaria’s border security and emergency services.
As the EU intensified its pressure campaign against Russia, Radev increasingly framed his opposition as a defense of national interest. In July 2024, he objected to financial support and arms transfers before stating, in February 2025, that diplomatic efforts should be intensified and begin to replace ‘shells and bombs.’ During the electoral campaign, Radev reiterated those positions urging the EU to resume dialogue with Russia over Europe’s future security architecture.
Against this background, few analysts expect a telegraphed break with the EU’s fragile geopolitical consensus. Yet, some casted Radev as a possible successor to Hungary’s Orbán as ‘the EU’s chief disruptor.’ While others see PB’s election triumph as the prelude to Bulgaria’s transformation into a vulnerability along NATO’s eastern flank. However, few have noted that the deeper ‘Radev risk’ lies less in his rhetoric about Moscow than in his ability to connect Russia-pragmatic geopolitics with prices, sovereignty, and everyday economic grievances. PB’s campaign linked higher fuel costs and inflation to EU sanctions and the phase-out of Russian energy imports, while reaffirming Bulgaria’s place inside NATO and the EU. Therefore, the risk for the EU is not an immediate Bulgarian exit, but the emergence of a popular government on NATO’s eastern flank that can present Russia-pragmatism as a matter of prices, sovereignty, and common sense.
Why the Kremlin-proxy Label Overstates the Case
Despite the Reshetnikov affair and his refusal to embrace the EU’s post-2022 military-aid and sanctions consensus, Radev does not fit the profile of a marginal anti-NATO figure emerging from Bulgaria’s Russophile fringe. As a former commander in Bulgaria’s Air Force, his career does not match the profile of an outsider associated from Bulgaria’s anti-NATO bloc. Also, he publicly supported the purchase of US-made hardware, even flying a US Air Force F-16 in 2024. Furthermore, PB’s program does not call for leaving the EU or NATO, unlike large nationalist-conservative parties like Revival (Figure 1), which make Euroscepticism and opposition to NATO central to their political identity.
PB’s program is centered less on geopolitics than on domestic capacity-building and economic development. Its platform links institutional renewal and economic development to dismantling the Borisov-Peevski oligarchic system. Indeed, Radev’s anti-corruption profile did not emerge only during the 2026 campaign. In the first part of the 2020s, Radev appointed caretaker governments that gave him institutional leverage in the confrontation with Borisov’s governments. The technocrats he appointed supported US sanctions against Peevski and reviewed procurements and concessions that allegedly benefited Borisov- and Peevski-linked networks.
In other words, Radev’s campaign and rhetoric framed anti-corruption and geopolitical questions as inextricably entangled. When Brussels and Euro-Atlantic policy circles underplay this domestic dimension, they risk reducing Radev to the ‘pro-Russian’ label. The foreign-domestic policy nexus becomes clearer when PB is compared with We Continue the Change (PP) and Democratic Bulgaria (DB). Those two parties also tried to connect anti-corruption with geopolitics, but in so doing they paired the fight against the Borisov-Peevski oligarchy with the need to safeguard ‘Bulgaria’s Euro-Atlantic choice.’ That strategy leveraged anti-corruption to strengthen a pro-Euro-Atlantic stance that was not widely popular across Bulgaria’s geopolitically polarized electorate (see Figure 2). Radev appears to have drawn a lesson from PP-DB’s failure to retain electoral momentum. He placed oligarchic corruption at the center of his campaign, but embedded it in a more ambiguous geopolitics built on sanction scepticism, pragmatism towards Russian, and support for the EU and NATO. In this sense, Radev challenges the Borisov-Peevski system domestically and professes Euro-Atlantic loyalty while pursuing policies compatible with Russia’s economic interests, especially in the energy sector.
Radev did not promise to take Bulgaria out of the ‘West’ through withdrawal from the EU or NATO or an explicit geopolitical realignment. He campaigned on redefining how much geopolitical and economic latitude Bulgaria can claim while remaining inside the institutions of the West. Unlike previous anti-corruption parties, PB separated anti-oligarchic mobilization from an explicitly pro-Euro-Atlantic framing. This refusal to force voters into a binary EU/Russia choice that seems inevitable in Brussels is exactly what makes his politics difficult to read from outside Bulgaria.
Radev’s Mandate for a Return to Strategic Ambiguity
Radev’s strategic ambiguity explains both the origins of the ‘pro-Russian’ label and the why it remains superficial. Practically, the deeper geopolitical meaning of Radev’s victory is not that Bulgaria has suddenly turned its back on Brussels or returned to Moscow’s orbit. Rather, Radev has revitalized a familiar Bulgarian policy of geopolitical balancing with a strong parliamentary mandate. The scale of PB’s victory suggests that the bet on not forcing voters into a dichotomous choice incompatible with their instincts paid off. By reversing the poles of the foreign-domestic nexus, Radev allowed anti-corruption voters, sanction-skeptical Russophiles, and conservative patriots to hear different promises in the same campaign. Thus, the ‘Radev risk’ is not withdrawal from Western institutions, but Bulgaria’s return to a more openly multi-vector and self-interested engagement with NATO allies, EU partners, and Russia; a posture often described in Bulgaria as ‘sitting on two chairs.’
Since its foundation in 1878, Bulgaria’s geopolitical orientation has been ambivalent, economic and military tied to Europe paired oddly with a deep cultural and political connection with Russia. Even without going so far back in time, Borisov’s governments were accused of inconsistency in Brussels, with the prime minister being described as ‘more pro-American, pro-Russian, and pro-European than anyone else.’ Rhetorically, Bulgaria performed euroatlanticism and stood as a stable, Euro-Atlantic actor in a strategic region. Meanwhile, Borisov and the elite around him remained deeply exposed to Russian energy interests and benefited from arrangements furthering Russia’s interests in the oil and gas markets.
A further question is whether geopolitical overlap between Radev and Borissov-era pragmatism creates room for tactical accommodation between PB and GERB. Some analysts have identified suspicious local voting shifts and a noted that media owned by and linked to Peevski slowed their attacks on Radev. These patterns do not prove a power-sharing deal, but they suggest that geopolitical consonance may have opened space for negotiation between Bulgaria’s old and new centers of power.
Overall, the reality on the ground points geopolitical continuity between Radev’s and Borisov’s Bulgaria, albeit obfuscated by an abrupt change in rhetoric. On the one hand, Sofia continues to modernize its armed forces by purchasing NATO hardware, as under Borisov; but with Radev it can also deliver the institutional reforms Brussels demands. On the other hand, free of baggage of scandals that restrained Borisov, Radev can play the Russia-pragmatic card and consolidate of a system in which embedding in the West and refusal of an anti-Russia stance coexist.
What to Watch Next
Despite the ‘pro-Russian’ label often used by Euro-Atlanticist analysts, Radev’s electoral victory is too large for Brussels to treat him as an accident or merely as a foreign power’s proxy. True, a formal rupture with the EU, the eurozone, or NATO remains extremely unlikely. However, Brussels has to accept that Bulgaria’s ambiguous ‘sitting on two chairs’ approach now has a strong parliamentary mandate. Hence, the more plausible ‘Radev risk’ is that Bulgaria becomes a more transactional player within the institutions of the West. Sofia may remain formally aligned with the EU while cooling its Ukraine policy and becoming more permissive towards Russian economic interests.
Critical of the EU at home and ambiguous in his positioning at international summits, Radev is unlikely to veto the EU’s sanctions against Russia or block others from supporting Ukraine. Arguably, his government will attempt to avoid direct confrontations with the commission because Bulgaria’s defense modernization depends heavily on EU financing.
In the upcoming months, Radev’s government will have to take decisions that can give a sense of how far Sofia’s geopolitical posture will drift. The relevant indicators will be appointments to the prosecution, regulators, energy agencies, security services, and state-owned enterprises; the handling of Lukoil’s Bulgarian assets; public tenders; and whether sanctions enforcement becomes merely formal. These domestic policies will tell more about the Radev-Borisov geopolitical continuity than his campaign statements. Most likely, a strengthening of the ‘two-chairs’ strategy will turn Bulgaria from a relatively passive partner into a transactional actor: unwilling to risk access to European funds, keen on buying US-made military hardware, but openly accommodating of Russia’s economic interests and still reliant on Russia-aligned oligarchic power-networks.
