The beginning of the campaign to elect Bulgaria’s seventh president as well as the proposed package of tax changes by the Finance Ministry dominate Friday’s news media.
ELECTION CAMPAIGN
Dnevnik carries an article dedicated to the beginning of the presidential campaign in Bulgaria that officially got under way on Friday. No public polling on candidate support has been released yet, since Vazrazhdane announced its nominee only at the last moment, leaving earlier field surveys incomplete. Election experts say the one certainty so far is that the vote will go to a second round, since the constitution requires both turnout above 50% and a single candidate winning over half the votes cast for a first-round win, a bar Bulgarian presidential elections have rarely cleared. Turnout is expected to run below April’s parliamentary elections, partly because GERB and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) have not fielded their own candidates or signalled which contender their voters should support. Sociologist Genoveva Petrova from Alpha Research said GERB voters remain more likely to decide independently, with some staying home and others drifting toward a candidate, while MRF voters are harder to predict. She also pointed to fading enthusiasm among voters who backed the former coalition Continue the Change – Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) in the past. Looking ahead, some pro-democratic politicians suggest the election could revive talk of uniting Bulgaria’s right-leaning camp, with Andrey Gurov potentially serving as a unifying figure if he outperforms CC-DB’s 2026 parliamentary result of over 408,000 votes. Parvan Simeonov from the Myara polling agency argues that GERB leader Boyko Borissov is positioning the party for a longer-term “confederation of the right,” betting that fading corruption allegations and deepening left-right, East-West polarisation could recreate a 1990s-style BSP-vs-UDF split. The publication concludes by stating that Bulgaria’s autumn 2027 local elections, where CC-DB could gain ground in many regional capitals, remain a key unknown in these longer-term calculations.
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On bTV’s morning programme, PR expert Diana Damyanova said that the field of candidates in the upcoming presidential election is dominated by a handful of genuine contenders, while most of the rest have personal rather than political motives. Fellow PR expert Pepi Dimitrova said many of the 22 lesser-known candidates are mainly seeking media exposure which she described as “a month of fame they won’t have to pay for out of pocket.” Dimitrova said only the top five candidates, seen as having a realistic shot at the runoff, warrant close attention, and predicted turnout could rise slightly, from around 25 to 27%, given the crowded field. According to her, the race had looked like a clearer contest between Iliana Iotova and Andrey Gurov, but Vazrazhdane’s entry has clouded who will target whom, with Vazrazhdane’s campaign likely aimed primarily at Iotova. She added that it is still too early in the campaign to read most candidates’ strategies, adding that early scandals surrounding the race serve neither candidates nor voters; she expects geopolitics and security to dominate the debate. Damyanova said attempts are being made to frame geopolitics as the central issue, but she believes Bulgarian voters are more focused on whether any real opposition to the current government will emerge. She questioned the narrative that the race is a two-way contest, arguing a third candidate has serious chances, partly because Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s foreign-policy rhetoric has unsettled some of his more pro-Russian-leaning supporters, who could shift to another candidate.
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On Bulgarian National Television, Central Election Commission (CEC) spokesperson Stoyanka Balova said that machine voting will be used in all polling stations except those with fewer than 300 registered voters. Balova said the paper used for machine-printed ballots this year will be noticeably thinner than in previous elections, since it no longer carries the legal status of a ballot itself. A procurement procedure for the paper starts next week, aimed at avoiding blank, short or otherwise defective printouts and control slips, with further details on paper specifications to follow. The CEC also plans diagnostics and maintenance on 12,800 voting machines, with funding secured for spare parts including printers, peripherals, batteries, flash drives and displays. Training for polling-station election commission members has not yet begun, but for the first time this year the CEC will run on-site training sessions, with teams traveling to train commissions directly (excluding stations abroad).
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Iva Lazarova from the Institute for Public Environment Development told the Bulgarian National Radio that almost EUR 500,000 will be distributed for campaign media packages if all registered participants choose to use this public funding. Lazarova said this campaign has seen a notable surge in candidates put forward by citizens’ nomination committees. Media packages, she said, were created as a mechanism to let participants without state subsidies reach voters, meaning this public resource needs careful monitoring to ensure it is spent lawfully. She noted that candidates put forth by nomination committees cannot draw on party funding in this campaign and will rely mainly on donations. On media packages more broadly, Lazarova said the same pattern recurs year after year – repeat recipients among political formations and candidates who draw significant public funding for media presence, while many of these formations’ annual financial reports show zero activity. Citing the 2021–2026 period, during which just over EUR 2.8 million was spent on media packages for parliamentary campaigns alone, she noted that some formations have run in nearly every parliamentary election yet often receive fewer votes than the number of signatures gathered to register their candidacy. This doesn’t automatically indicate abuse, she said, but after so many election cycles, the mechanism’s actual effect warrants evaluation.
WINDFALL TAX
As the Bulgarian Government announces plans to introduce a windfall-profits tax, a review by the 24 Chasa daily found the measure already in use across Europe: Hungary taxes financial and credit institutions, Romania taxes banks and oil and gas companies, Spain taxes large corporations, the UK taxes oil and gas firms, and the Czechia, after previously taxing and then dropping a tax on refineries, is preparing to reintroduce one; Poland and Portugal are discussing extending such measures to new sectors amid rising petroleum and gas prices.
In Bulgaria, the tax would apply to banks, insurers, retail chains with at least five outlets, telecoms, currency-exchange bureaus and payday lenders, while manufacturing, transport and agriculture would be exempt. The measure has established critics. The International Monetary Fund has warned it can curb investment through ordinary business logic. A company investing EUR 1 billion in a new plant expects future profits to offset the risk, but if the State signals it will claim a larger share once profits climb too high, investors may factor that into decisions and invest less, or elsewhere. A second criticism concerns the difficulty of defining “windfall” profit itself: if a company earned EUR 120 million, 140 million and 300 million over a three-year reference period, it’s unclear whether “normal” profit should be the three-year average, a fixed return on capital, competitors’ profits, or another benchmark. Views differ on inflation effects – some argue the tax pushes prices up, others that it removes companies’ incentive to raise prices and generate windfall profits they would partly lose anyway. There is also a reasonable concern that once introduced, investors will expect the measure to reappear in future crises, complicating business planning, and that any expansion to new sectors could further distort investment decisions. The hardest criticism to dismiss and the trickiest calibration challenge is ensuring the tax doesn’t end up penalizing successful entrepreneurship: if a company invested wisely, adopted new technology and earned high profits as a result, that profit isn’t obviously “windfall” merely because it’s large. Some business representatives argue that, given Bulgaria’s existing corporate tax, a separate windfall tax shouldn’t be layered on top.
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Deputy Finance Minister Lyudmila Petkova told bTV that a windfall-profits tax on select sectors, changes to food vouchers, and new tax relief for families with children are among tax measures the Finance Ministry has proposed for 2027. She said there will be no higher excise duty on electric vehicles, but property tax valuations will rise. The package combines revenue-raising measures with reduced administrative burden and tax relief for families and business; the revenue measures are expected to yield around EUR 1.4 billion, with roughly EUR 300 million earmarked for child benefits, support for children with disabilities, and a new child-development allowance. The ministry’s goal is to bring the 2027 budget deficit down to 3%, Petkova said. The tax is proposed as temporary, applying only to 2027 profits. Asked whether the added cost would simply be passed to customers through higher fees, Petkova argued the tax could actually work as an anti-inflationary measure, since higher prices would themselves increase the windfall profit subject to taxation. She acknowledged banks already pass costs to consumers via fees, low deposit rates and high loan rates, but said the point of the tax is to channel part of the windfall into the budget to support other state priorities such as culture, healthcare, education.
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Progressive Bulgaria MP Yavor Gechev defended the Government’s proposed 2027 tax changes on Nova TV’s morning programme arguing that balancing the system and improving revenue collection necessarily means affecting certain sectors. Gechev pushed back on the notion that price increases hadn’t produced windfall profits, stressing the tax would apply only to profit above a company’s normal level, not total income. The system compares current profits against the previous five years; only amounts exceeding that historical baseline would be taxed, targeting a defined group of companies in sectors where the ministry identified revenue imbalances. He said he does not expect this to trigger widespread tax avoidance, expressing confidence in tax authorities’ ability to close loopholes. Asked why the Lukoil refinery is excluded from the list, Gechev said the company shows no windfall profit and that the situation requires careful handling, given it operates under a temporary state-appointed administrator. He warned that overly aggressive measures aimed at cutting the company’s profit to force lower fuel prices could trigger legal claims from its owners. Responding to experts who argue current fuel oversupply could allow pump prices to fall by around 20 cents, Gechev said Bulgaria cannot manage the fuel market unilaterally, describing Lukoil as structurally significant not just for Bulgaria but for Europe also.
SOCIETY
Mediapool writes that more than 1,000 elderly people are on waiting lists for placement in state-funded care homes, even as the system holds more than 1,500 vacant places. The apparent contradiction stems from sharp regional imbalances – vacant capacity is not located where demand is highest. Capacity in state and municipal homes has barely changed over the past decade, and two-thirds of people in residential care are now housed in private facilities, which many families cannot afford, adding further pressure on the state-funded system. State and municipal elderly-home capacity has grown only marginally over ten years – from 85 facilities with 5,607 places in 2016 to 94 facilities with 5,783 places in 2026, an increase of just 3.1%. Meanwhile the number of actual residents has fallen, from 5,263 in 2016 to 4,217 by August 2026, with the sharpest drop in 2020, when Covid-19 restrictions and high mortality among the elderly pushed occupancy from 5,415 in 2019 down to 4,044. Numbers have recovered gradually since but remain below pre-pandemic levels, while the waiting list has climbed steadily. The social ministry says the decade-long reform’s goal is not to mechanically expand residential places but to shift the model itself, from large institutions toward smaller, more individualised, community-integrated services and that capacity trends should be read in that context rather than as a pure quantitative indicator. Eurostat data shows Bulgaria trailing EU averages on home-based care – in 2022, only 6.5% of potentially dependent Bulgarians over 65 received publicly funded home care, against an EU average of 29.6%, while 9.6% received residential care, against an EU average of 17.7%. The Commission overall points to substantial unmet long-term-care needs, staffing shortages, and affordability problems across the bloc, where the number of people needing long-term care is projected to rise from 30.8 million in 2019 to 38.1 million by 2050.
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Bulgaria’s payday-loan sector has grown to enormous proportions, with clear links to the gambling sector, Capital reports. Much of the market operates outside registration with the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB) and is therefore illegal, while the State has struggled to address the problem partly because oversight is split among institutions for which this is not a core function. Bulgaria’s payday-loan boom has tracked the boom in gambling advertising and venues, a problem the government of Rumen Radev has moved to address through amendments to the Gambling Act, and increasingly the two markets overlap directly. Loans are easy for gambling addicts to obtain, letting them keep betting while sinking into debt as they roll over one loan into another – a pattern psychologists call “credit mania.” Untangling payday lending may prove harder than addressing gambling addiction itself, given a fractured legal framework: companies register with the BNB but are regulated by the Commission for Consumer Protection, neither of which treats this as core business, and the term “payday loan” ranges from major regional players to garage-based, fully illegal lenders. The BNB’s registry currently lists 271 active non-bank financial institutions, of which about 238 focus on lending, but hundreds of unregistered “garage offices” operate outside it, undeterred by fines of a few thousand euro; firms where lending makes up under 30% of activity also fall outside the registry. Regulatory gaps persist partly because payday loans were originally conceived as small consumer credit for routine purchases, a relatively modest segment (non-bank household lending stood under EUR 2.9 billion per BNB data) that draws less supervisory attention than banking. A second factor is weak institutional response to abusive debt-collection practices. Mass police raids on unregistered offices are seen as an unreliable fix, justified mainly where accompanying crimes (violence, fraud) are documented, since unlicensed lending alone is only an administrative offence.
Media Review: September 25 2026 THE NEWS FROM BULGARIA – NEWS AGENCY 2009-2025 2026-09-25 09:10:59
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