分类： politics

Just days after Hungarian voters delivered a sharp rebuke to Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian far-right agenda, Bulgaria is gearing up for another early national election that could propel a well-known left-leaning former head of state into the prime minister’s office.

Years of unbroken political instability have gripped this EU and NATO member state of 6.5 million people, and this April 19 snap vote marks the eighth early election the country has held in just five years. The crisis stretches back to 2021, when long-serving conservative Prime Minister Boyko Borissov stepped down after mass public protests over systemic corruption and pervasive inequality. Since that turning point, no sitting administration has managed to hold power for longer than 12 months, falling to either mass street demonstrations or parliamentary backroom maneuvers. This constant rotation has eroded public trust in state institutions, driven widespread voter apathy, and pushed election turnout down to historic lows in recent cycles.

The frontrunner in this latest vote is 62-year-old Rumen Radev, a former fighter pilot and air force commander who stepped down from his largely ceremonial post as president in January, cutting his second five-year term short to launch a bid for the prime ministership. One of Bulgaria’s most popular public figures, Radev leads the center-left Progressive Bulgaria coalition, and has campaigned on a promise of sweeping change to end the country’s ongoing political paralysis. His platform centers on rooting out the oligarchic corruption that has plagued Bulgarian public life for decades, a message that has resonated deeply with voters frustrated by years of graft and institutional failure. Mass anti-corruption protests that drew hundreds of thousands of mostly young demonstrators to the streets late last year forced the collapse of the previous conservative-led government, clearing the way for this new snap vote.

Bulgaria has made major European integration strides in recent years: it joined the border-free Schengen Area in 2024, and adopted the euro as its official currency on January 1 this year. But the country has also faced growing concerns over Russian interference in its domestic politics. Last month, Sofia formally requested assistance from the EU’s diplomatic service to counter coordinated Russian efforts to shape Bulgarian public opinion through social media disinformation campaigns and pro-Kremlin propaganda outlets. Experts have warned that active networks of covert Russian influence accounts are working to sow political division within the country ahead of the vote.

Unlike previous low-turnout contests, pre-election polling projects that turnout this Sunday will rise above 50%, up from an average of just 35% in recent elections. Analysts attribute the expected increase to the high-profile candidacy of Radev, as well as new confidence-building measures from the interim government, which has carried out nationwide police raids, made multiple arrests, and launched pretrial proceedings targeting widespread vote-buying.

Most opinion polls, which carry a margin of error between 3 and 3.5 percentage points, show Radev’s coalition capturing more than 30% of the vote, putting it roughly 10 percentage points ahead of its closest competitor: Borissov’s center-right GERB party, the same conservative bloc that was ousted from power in December’s protests. While Radev is widely projected to win a plurality of votes, he will need to form a coalition government to rule, and he has already ruled out working with both GERB and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, whose leader Delyan Peevksi has been sanctioned for corruption by both the United States and United Kingdom.

The most likely potential coalition partner is the pro-Western bloc “We Continue the Change”, which polls forecast will take third place with 12% to 14% of the vote. However, deep disagreements over foreign policy threaten to derail any potential partnership. While Radev has officially condemned Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has repeatedly opposed sending military aid to Kyiv and has publicly called for reopening diplomatic negotiations with Russia to end the conflict, aligning with the Eurosceptic and pro-Russian positions that have drawn support from a segment of the Bulgarian electorate.

Even with these leanings, some political analysts argue that Radev is unlikely to attempt a major foreign policy reorientation toward Moscow. Evelina Slavkova, a researcher with Bulgaria’s Trend polling center, noted that the country’s existing institutional ties to the EU and NATO — reinforced by its recent accession to the eurozone and Schengen Area — create strong structural guardrails that keep Bulgaria anchored to Western institutions.

“Our country has succeeded, despite all the obstacles, despite disagreements among some politicians, in building a very important set of tools that keeps Bulgaria on the right track,” Slavkova told the Associated Press. “These memberships allow us to be much more at ease” with our current Western alignment, she added.

Slavkova also pointed out that Radev has deliberately avoided taking clear, definitive stances on divisive issues during the campaign, attempting to straddle competing political positions to broaden his appeal. While that strategic ambiguity may work well on the campaign trail, she noted, governing the country will eventually require Radev to offer clear, uncompromising answers to the pressing challenges facing Bulgaria.

Even before Hungary’s newly elected administration takes office, European Union officials have launched urgent preliminary negotiations with the transition team of election winner Péter Magyar in Budapest, aiming to resolve two critical bloc priorities: unlocking €17 billion ($20 billion) in frozen Hungarian aid and moving forward on a massive long-term loan package for Ukraine. The talks, scheduled for Friday, mark an accelerated push to build cooperation with the incoming government after 16 years of Euroskeptic rule under outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

European Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho confirmed the urgency of the discussions from Brussels on Thursday, noting that time is running out for several high-stakes policy files. By holding pre-inauguration talks, Pinho explained, the bloc intends to avoid unnecessary delays, ensuring that immediate action can be taken as soon as Magyar’s government is sworn in next month. “The clock is ticking for a number of topics,” Pinho said, adding that preliminary talks would clear the way for swift action “if appropriate” once the new government takes power.

The billions in funding were frozen by the EU in 2022 over widespread concerns about systemic corruption and democratic backsliding during Orbán’s populist administration. For years, the European Commission accused Orbán’s government of eroding judicial independence, cracking down on independent media and academia, violating minority rights, and undermining the rule of law — all charges Orbán rejected as illegitimate interference in Hungary’s national sovereignty. Now, both the EU and Hungary’s incoming leadership have made unlocking the funds a top priority, as the injection of capital is widely seen as critical to stabilizing Hungary’s struggling economy.

The €17 billion is split into two portions: €10 billion in COVID-19 economic recovery funds and €6.3 billion in EU cohesion funding allocated to support underperforming regional economies across the bloc. Negotiators are prioritizing unlocking the recovery funds first, as they face an August expiration deadline, after which the money will be permanently lost to Hungary. Around €10.2 billion of the originally frozen total was approved for release last year after partial reforms under Orbán, leaving the current €17 billion still held in Brussels.

Speaking on social platform X earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — who was repeatedly targeted with harsh criticism by Orbán during the recent election campaign — laid out three clear conditions for unlocking the funds: restoring the rule of law, realigning Hungarian policy with shared EU values, and implementing structural reforms to unlock access to European investment. Magyar’s party Tisza secured a parliamentary supermajority in the April 12 landslide election, giving the incoming government the legislative power to pass deep, rapid reforms to meet these conditions.

Magyar has already publicly committed to making judicial independence, academic freedom, press freedom, and anti-corruption overhauls his administration’s top policy priorities to unlock the funding. In his first post-election press conference Monday, Magyar emphasized that Hungary faces severe financial distress, and his government’s core mission is to secure the funds that rightfully belong to the country. He also made a key commitment to EU leaders: unlike his predecessor, he will honor the December 2024 agreement to provide Ukraine with a €90 billion macroeconomic stabilization loan, a deal Orbán unexpectedly vetoed after initially signaling support, sparking outrage across the 27-nation bloc.

Policy analysts say the incoming government faces few technical barriers to unlocking the funds quickly, thanks to its legislative supermajority. Zsolt Darvas, a senior fellow at Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, noted that all required legislative changes can be completed in a single day if Tisza moves forward with its reform agenda. The core changes required are adjustments to judicial selection processes and judicial powers, changes that Darvas described as technically straightforward and easy to implement.

To meet the August expiration deadline for COVID recovery funds, Darvas added that Magyar can follow a precedent set by Poland and Portugal, where unused funds were parked in national development banks for future disbursement if final reforms are not completed by the cutoff. Still, Hungary has already incurred significant costs from the two-year funding freeze: Darvas estimates that roughly €2 billion of the originally allocated €16 billion has already been permanently lost. On top of that, Hungary has paid €1 million in daily fines since June 13, 2024, plus a one-time €200 million penalty, over Orbán’s refusal to align Hungary’s asylum policies with EU standards. Darvas noted that Hungary could also end these fines by following Poland’s example, maintaining restrictive migration policies while still complying with basic EU legal requirements.

While unlocking the frozen funds will not solve Hungary’s long-running economic crisis on its own, Darvas explained that complying with EU regulations will send a critical signal to international investors that Hungary is once again a stable, predictable destination for foreign capital. Beyond the frozen funds, Hungary could also access an additional €16 billion in low-interest loans through the EU’s new €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative, a program designed to boost European defense industrial capacity as the United States reduces its security commitments to the continent. According to analysis from Jeremy Cliffe of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the combination of frozen funds and SAFE loans would total roughly 15% of Hungary’s annual GDP. Eighteen of the EU’s 27 member states have already accessed SAFE funding, and Hungary is eligible to join the program immediately once it aligns with EU defense policy priorities.

BARCELONA, Spain – Brazil’s progressive President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva touched down in Barcelona Friday for a high-profile two-day official visit, kicking off a series of multilateral gatherings that bring together like-minded leaders of small and mid-sized nations united by shared concerns over eroding democratic norms and the expanding influence of far-right populism across the globe.

Lula and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez, both widely recognized as leading standard-bearers of progressive politics across their respective continents, have positioned themselves as vocal critics of the policies and agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has previously imposed and threatened additional punitive tariffs on both of their economies. For years, reactionary political factions and far-right populist movements have gained steady traction across the Americas and Europe, creating a urgent push for coordinated action from centrist and left-leaning democratic leaders.

The visit opens with a bilateral meeting between Lula, Sánchez and their full cabinet delegations at Barcelona’s historic former royal palace, where the two heads of state are set to sign a series of new bilateral agreements covering economic cooperation, technological innovation and joint social policy initiatives. These one-on-one talks will serve as a precursor to two major multilateral summits scheduled for Saturday, held at Barcelona’s sprawling central conference center, which will draw political leaders from every populated continent.

The first of Saturday’s gatherings is the fourth edition of the Meeting in Defense of Democracy, a forum first launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 to facilitate cross-border collaboration against what organizers frame as three core threats to participatory democracy: rising extremism, deepening political polarization, and rampant misinformation. Previous iterations of the summit have been hosted at United Nations headquarters in New York and in Santiago, Chile, in 2024.

Despite both leaders’ public opposition to many of Trump’s policy choices – including his joint military strike against Iran alongside Israel – Lula pushed back against framing the summit as an explicit anti-Trump rally. Speaking in an interview with Spanish national newspaper El País Thursday, Lula clarified: “This is not going to be an anti-Trump meeting. We are going to discuss the state of democracy, to see what went wrong and what we have to do to repair it.”

This year’s summit will boast an impressive lineup of attending heads of state and senior leaders, including European Council President Antonio Costa, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, alongside leaders from smaller nations ranging from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.

Sheinbaum’s presence at the gathering comes on the heels of a breakthrough in a long-running diplomatic dispute between Madrid and Mexico City, when Spain’s King Felipe VI recently acknowledged that the Spanish conquest of the Americas resulted in widespread abuse against Indigenous peoples, clearing a path for normalized high-level engagement. Sheinbaum, who has emerged as one of the most influential progressive voices in Latin America amid the region’s recent rightward political shift and mounting pressure from the Trump administration, maintains high approval ratings at home and has struck a careful diplomatic balance: preserving functional ties with Washington while firmly pushing back on Trump’s policies that threaten regional sovereignty.

Following the close of the democracy summit, most attending leaders will remain in Barcelona for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, a new gathering of left-leaning politicians and policy experts hosted at the same venue later Saturday. The initiative grew out of a 2024 conversation between Sánchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, now president of the Party of European Socialists, during a meeting of European socialist leaders.

Both Lula and Sánchez are set to deliver keynote addresses at the mobilization, which is expected to draw 3,000 total attendees including U.S. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. The event will feature a full schedule of roundtable discussions covering a wide range of progressive priorities, from addressing global wage inequality to developing new strategies to improve progressive electoral performance at the national level.

The summits cap a busy stretch of international diplomacy for Sánchez, who recently returned from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping – his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years. In a striking break with Washington, Sánchez’s center-left government has already closed Spanish airspace to U.S. military aircraft deployed for operations in the Iran war, and has refused to allow the U.S. access to jointly operated military bases in southern Spain for any activities related to the conflict. Earlier this week, Lula also released a public video message expressing “deep solidarity” with Pope Leo XIV, after Trump launched a series of public criticisms of the pontiff following the Pope’s public condemnation of the Iran war.

Pol Morillas, director of Barcelona-based foreign affairs think tank CIDOB, notes that the dual summits represent a deliberate show of force by mainstream democratic leaders, who have watched far-right populist groups successfully leverage international gatherings to spread their core messages of anti-immigration policy and economic nationalism. Morillas frames the gatherings as aligned with the core argument of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s widely discussed January speech at the Davos World Economic Forum, which called on global “middle powers” to develop new collective strategies to navigate an increasingly fragmented world dominated by confrontational superpowers.

Morillas told the Associated Press that Lula, Sánchez and the other participating leaders “share the understanding that the world is not just for the great powers.” The event reflects a growing push among mid-sized and smaller democratic nations to carve out a collective, independent voice on global issues ranging from democratic governance to conflict resolution. AP correspondents Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil contributed reporting to this article.