Rosen Zhelyazkov’s resignation on December 11, 2025, just minutes before the Bulgarian parliament was due to vote on the sixth no-confidence motion against his cabinet, marks the abrupt end of yet another short-lived government in a country that has now been trapped in near-permanent political crisis for more than five years.
The immediate trigger was a wave of nationwide protests that began in late November over the government’s draft 2026 budget – the first to be presented in euros ahead of the country’s scheduled entry into the eurozone on January 1, 2026. What started as anger over proposed increases in dividend taxes and social-security contributions quickly morphed into a broader, visceral rejection of systemic corruption, oligarchic capture, and the perceived arrogance of the political class. Within days, tens of thousands of people – students, pensioners, ethnic Bulgarians and Turks alike – were filling the streets of Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and smaller towns. The scale and diversity of the crowds were striking in a country of fewer than seven million inhabitants.
Zhelyazkov’s cabinet, formed in early 2025 after the October 2024 parliamentary election, was always fragile. It rested on a minority coalition dominated by GERB (the party of longtime strongman Boyko Borissov) and tolerated, rather than actively supported, by the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) and figures close to the sanctioned media magnate Delyan Peevski. From the outset, the government was dogged by the same accusations that have haunted every administration since the great anti-corruption protests of summer 2020: that it served narrow elite interests while ordinary citizens continued to suffer from the EU’s highest poverty rate, lowest wages, and most entrenched corruption.
The current crisis is only the latest chapter in a grinding cycle. Since Borissov’s fall in 2020–2021, Bulgaria has held seven parliamentary elections and seen six prime ministers come and go, none of whom lasted a full term. Each collapse has followed the same pattern: a shaky coalition, mutual recriminations, a no-confidence vote or the withdrawal of informal support, and then fresh elections that reproduce the same fragmented parliament. Public trust in institutions has collapsed to the low teens, and the country’s chronic inability to form stable governments has repeatedly delayed or jeopardised key strategic goals – Schengen membership (finally achieved in 2024), euro adoption, and the disbursement of billions in EU recovery funds.
Hellbound and Down 
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