Bulgaria decides its parliaments on Sundays, and few of those Sundays have echoed longer than this one. On 5 July 2009, a Sunday much like today, Bulgarians elected the 41st National Assembly and, without quite realising it at the time, opened a political era that would run for more than a decade. If you have ever wondered why one particular name surfaces in every political conversation you half-follow in the café, this is the day it started.
What happened on this day
The decisive winner was GERB, a party barely three years old. Founded in 2006 as the personal political vehicle of Boyko Borissov, it took 40% of the vote. The governing Bulgarian Socialist Party managed around 18% and was duly shown the door. The heaviest fall, though, belonged to the National Movement Simeon II, the party of Bulgaria's former tsar turned prime minister: it slipped under the 4% threshold and won nothing at all. From running the country to zero seats inside a decade, which rather sets the tone for how Bulgarian politics treats its former favourites.
Turnout was 60.6%, one of the lowest the country had recorded to that point. And the deeper pattern held: just as at every parliamentary election since the fall of communism, the sitting government was not returned. Bulgarian voters had, quite literally, never yet given a government a second consecutive term.
The 2009 vote was also an experiment in electoral engineering. For the first time, Bulgaria ran a parallel voting system: 209 of the 240 seats were distributed proportionally, while the remaining 31, one for each constituency in the country, Shumen's included, went to whoever came first past the post locally.
The run-up supplied its own drama. On 3 April 2009, Yane Yanev, leader of the small Order, Law and Justice party, and a group of independent MPs pushed through a change raising the electoral threshold for coalitions from 4% to 8%, a move aimed squarely at rival alliances. Parliament passed it; the Constitutional Court struck it down on 12 May 2009, barely six weeks later. The institutions, in theory and on this occasion in practice, did their job.
Why this matters for British expats
Because the man who won that Sunday is the skeleton key to fifteen years of Bulgarian political talk. Borissov went on to serve as prime minister three times: 2009 to 2013, 2014 to 2017, and 2017 to 2021. Knowing that his era began on 5 July 2009, and that Bulgarian governments simply did not get re-elected, is most of what you need to decode the shrugging fatalism your Bulgarian neighbours bring to election season. It is not apathy so much as pattern recognition.
There is a certain symmetry on offer this year, too. This April, Bulgaria voted again, its eighth parliamentary election in five years, and GERB and its allies took just 39 seats against the 131 won by Progressive Bulgaria. The party that announced itself with 40% on a July Sunday in 2009 now sits a long way from the wheel. Bulgarian politics gives nothing away for long.
You cannot vote in these contests, parliamentary elections are for Bulgarian citizens only, but you certainly live with the results: whoever holds power in Sofia writes the rules on everything from residency permits to how the euro changeover was administered. Worth watching, even from the sidelines.
Sources and further reading
The account of the 2009 vote draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the election and its English-language counterpart, with the April 2026 seat totals as confirmed by Bulgaria's election commission and reported at the time.