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Bulgaria held its eighth parliamentary election in five years on April 19, 2026. The Guinness Book of Records might soon find itself in competition with the Central Election Commission in Sofia for the most reliable chronicle of Bulgarian political milestones, but the result was, for once, reasonably decisive. Former President Rumen Radev, who resigned his largely ceremonial office in January in order to enter the murkier but more consequential arena of parliamentary politics, led his freshly minted Progressive Bulgaria coalition to a result not seen since 1997: an outright majority, 131 seats out of 240, enough to govern alone and, in principle, enough to silence, at least temporarily, the revolving door that has been the defining institutional feature of Bulgarian public life since 2021.

One might be tempted to conclude that the crisis is over. One would be advised, however, to read the fine print. The same institutional landscape that generated eight elections in five years does not disappear simply because one actor has achieved a majority within it. The party system remains deeply fragmented beneath Radev's victory; GERB, once the gravitational centre of Bulgarian politics, received barely 13 percent; the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a fixture of the country's political life since the transition, failed to enter parliament at all, a development that, as one analyst drily noted, would have seemed not merely unlikely but slightly impolite to predict even a few years ago. What Radev has won is a mandate, not a transformation. The man himself is a sufficiently paradoxical figure to suggest that predictability is not necessarily the order of the day: a former air force commander with warm feelings towards Moscow, who blocked a referendum on the euro, cultivated a Kremlin-friendly image while denouncing the oligarchic system, and managed to position himself simultaneously as outsider and establishment.

What political paralysis actually costs

All of this invites a more fundamental question that the drama of election nights tends to obscure: what does it actually cost a country, in concrete and measurable terms, to be governed the way Bulgaria has been governed for the past five years?

The most instructive comparison, and the one most frequently invoked in the academic literature on the subject, is Belgium. Belgium, a country of extraordinary institutional complexity with three official languages, three regions, three communities, and a federal structure of bewildering intricacy, went 541 days without an elected government following its June 2010 elections, a world record at the time, subsequently broken, with characteristic Belgian self-deprecation, by Brussels itself in 2025. During that period, a caretaker government under Yves Leterme kept the lights on, civil servants were paid, trains ran, and Belgian beer continued to be brewed. A study published in 2019 concluded that the government formation deadlock did not measurably harm economic growth.

The capacity to survive without government is not a sign of governmental irrelevance. It is a sign of deep institutional roots.

Belgian society, accustomed to functioning in spite of rather than because of its federal government, adapted with a phlegmatism that one observer, Arnold Kling, captured admirably: “In the sixties the people were agitated but politics was serene. Nowadays politics is agitated but the people remain serene.”

This is precisely the kind of institutional resilience that separates a Belgium from a Bulgaria, or a Romania. The capacity to survive without government is not a sign of governmental irrelevance; it is a sign of deep institutional roots: an independent civil service that knows what to do without being told, local and regional government structures with genuine competence and resources, a legal system that functions on its own momentum, a business environment that does not require political patronage to operate. In short, it is the product of centuries of accumulated state-building, during which institutions became genuinely autonomous from whoever happened to be nominally in charge.

Bulgaria has been building its institutions for considerably less time and under considerably less favourable conditions. The results are visible in the numbers. Political instability, dominated by short-lived coalition governments, has delayed the reforms needed to access the full EUR 5.5 billion from the EU's Recovery and Resilience Facility, prompting the loss of approximately EUR 600 million in grants. The European Commission withheld over a billion euros in funding due to delays in implementing anti-corruption and judicial accountability measures. Public and private investment suffered from political uncertainty, while voter turnout in successive elections fell, reflecting widespread public distrust and disillusionment with repeated governmental crises. The IMF noted explicitly that protracted political instability would “negatively affect economic sentiment and investment,” language that, translated from the diplomatic register of multilateral institutions, means: investors are watching, and what they are watching is not encouraging.

The contrast with Belgium is not merely anecdotal. It reflects a structural truth about what institutional depth actually means: it is the ability of a state to continue functioning, absorbing EU funds, maintaining fiscal discipline, implementing reforms, attracting investment, regardless of who is or is not sitting in the prime ministerial chair. Belgium can afford 541 days without a government because Belgium has a government in the deeper sense: a state apparatus, a professional bureaucracy, an independent judiciary, a local governance structure, that operates on its own. Countries like Bulgaria, or Romania, cannot afford the same luxury because in them the state is far more personal, far more dependent on the political class for its direction and its will, and therefore far more exposed to the costs of political paralysis.

The Romanian superiority complex and its discontents

It is at this point that we must turn to the Romanian habit of measuring itself against Bulgaria, a habit that combines elements of condescension and insecurity in roughly equal measure, and that is almost entirely mistaken in its premises.

The Romanian superiority complex with respect to Bulgaria is a peculiar cultural artifact. It manifests in newspaper commentary and in dinner table conversations. Its content, broadly summarized, is the proposition that Romania is more developed, better governed, more European, and more capable of strategic achievement than its Southern neighbour. Without Bulgaria, we would be in last place on most European rankings.

This reading, however comfortable, happens to be wrong, and wrong in a way that reveals more about Romanian intellectual habits than it does about Bulgarian reality.

The euro occupies a peculiar place in this conversation. Romanian elites and much of the public look at Bulgaria’s euro adoption with a mixture of envy and anxiety, treating it as evidence of Bulgarian strategic capability and, implicitly, as a reproach to Romanian stagnation. This reaction misreads both what the euro meant for Bulgaria and what it would mean for Romania.

Bulgaria’s currency board was introduced in 1997, pegging the lev first to the Deutsche Mark and subsequently, automatically, to the euro at the fixed rate of 1.95583 BGN to 1 EUR. From that moment, Bulgaria surrendered its monetary sovereignty in full: every lev in circulation had to be backed by hard currency reserves, the central bank could not print money to bail out troubled institutions, and the government could not monetize its deficits. Bulgaria bore all the costs of monetary union for nearly three decades, foregoing the exchange rate flexibility that a less competitive economy might have used to cushion shocks and support exports. The predictable consequence was a widening disparity in GDP per capita relative to peers who retained their currencies and used depreciation as an occasional adjustment tool. Romanian and Bulgarian GDP/capita was at parity in the beginning of the 2000s. Romania surged ahead on the back also of natural devaluation (not the competitive devaluation practiced by Hungary and Poland). Bulgaria paid this price in advance, year after year, long before formal euro membership was on the table.

Seen in this light, joining the euro in January 2026 was not an achievement; it was overdue compensation. Having already accepted the medicine, Bulgaria was finally admitted to the ward. The lower borrowing costs, the elimination of exchange rate risk, the signal to investors, all of it was a belated return on a bet placed in 1997. To view this as a Bulgarian triumph to be envied is to misunderstand the transaction entirely.

Romania’s situation is structurally different, and not in a way that makes euro adoption obviously desirable. Romania retained the leu and with it the capacity, frequently exercised, to allow gradual currency depreciation, providing a periodic competitive cushion for an economy still in the process of structural adjustment. Romanian industry and exports have benefited from this flexibility. More to the point, Romania does not currently meet the convergence criteria and is unlikely to do so in any near-term scenario that does not involve a significant compression of wages, public spending, and fiscal deficits. Whether Romania should aspire to the eurozone at all, given its current economic structure, the degree of euroization of its private sector, and the persistence of competitiveness gaps with the eurozone core, is a question that deserves a serious answer rather than the reflex envy that Bulgaria’s accession has provoked. The leu’s devaluation, so often cited as a symptom of Romanian failure, has also been a quiet subsidy to Romanian exporters and a buffer against shocks that a fixed exchange rate would have transmitted directly into unemployment and contraction.

The inconvenient ledger of concrete achievement

Beyond the currency question, the Romanian superiority complex runs into further empirical difficulties when confronted with the record of concrete strategic achievement.

As of November 2025, Bulgaria had 911 kilometres of motorways in service. Romania, a country considerably larger in both territory and population, had 1,137 kilometres by the end of 2024, a gap far smaller than the difference in country size would suggest, and one that is narrowing. More to the point, Bulgaria has been delivering highway kilometres at a pace that belies the narrative of institutional dysfunction: in 2023-2024 alone, Bulgaria opened 166 kilometres of expressways and highways, a figure that Romanian infrastructure delivery, for all its recent improvement, would struggle to match on a consistent annual basis for an equivalently sized network expansion.

The supercomputing question is more striking still. Bulgaria hosts the EuroHPC Discoverer supercomputer, inaugurated in October 2021 at Sofia Tech Park, co-financed by Bulgaria and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking at a total cost of EUR 11.5 million, with a performance of 4.5 petaflops, ranking 91st globally on the TOP500 list at the time of its launch. This is in addition to the earlier IBM Blue Gene/P system operated by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Sofia, which served the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Romania is a member of the same EuroHPC Joint Undertaking and a country that frequently presents itself as a regional technology hub with significant IT sector ambitions, yet it does not host a single EuroHPC supercomputer. The map of EuroHPC facilities with supercomputers runs through Sofia, Ostrava, Kajaani, Bologna, Luxembourg, Guimarães, Maribor, and Barcelona. Bucharest does not appear on it.

This is not a minor administrative oversight. Supercomputing infrastructure is strategic: it underpins pharmaceutical research, climate modelling, materials science, AI development, and national security applications. The decision to secure a EuroHPC facility requires institutional capacity, scientific credibility, administrative competence, and the political will to co-finance, then negotiate and follow through on a complex European partnership. Bulgaria did all of these things. Romania has not. The comfortable assumption that Romania's larger size, higher GDP, and greater international visibility automatically translate into greater strategic capability is not supported by this evidence.

One could extend the analysis to other domains, including Bulgaria's earlier and more complete absorption of certain EU structural funds, its strategic implementation of pipeline projects to become a transit country for energy coming through Türkiye from a variety of sources including Russian ones, and the relative coherence of the Bulgarian fiscal framework even through the political crisis. The pattern is consistent. Bulgaria has, across a range of concrete strategic benchmarks, performed better than the Romanian narrative allows.

A mandate, not a transformation

None of this is to minimize the severity of the Bulgarian political crisis, which has been real and costly. Eight elections since 2021, the result of a five-year political crisis, have left the country in an electoral doom loop whose costs, in delayed reforms, foregone EU funding, suppressed investment, and institutional wear, are substantial and compounding. The question is whether Radev's majority will prove durable. A PB government seems likely to sound like Viktor Orbán when it comes to foreign policy ambiguity but act more like Robert Fico, positioning with studied imprecision, providing rhetoric without rupture, and navigating between Brussels and Moscow with the practiced equivocation that small countries sometimes deploy as a substitute for strategy. His Russian hedging was real, but his room for maneuver within EU and NATO frameworks is limited, and his primary mandate, covering anti-corruption, institutional reform, and stable governance, is one that, if even partially fulfilled, would represent genuine progress.

The more interesting observation, from a comparative perspective, is what the Bulgarian experience reveals about the conditions under which political instability becomes economically catastrophic rather than merely disruptive. In Bulgaria, the damage was real but contained: growth continued, the currency board held, the banking system remained stable, and euro adoption proceeded, if with delays. The institutions, imperfect and embattled as they are, provided a floor. This is not the same as having Belgian institutional depth, but it is not nothing.

Romania, which looks at Bulgaria from a position of assumed superiority, would do well to ask itself whether its own institutional floor is as solid as it believes, and whether its political class, currently engaged in its own varieties of instability, its own cycles of coalition arithmetic and institutional erosion, is building the kind of state that can survive political turbulence without transmitting it directly into investor sentiment, credit ratings, and the daily lives of citizens. The leu is still devaluing. The motorways are being built, but slowly. The supercomputer map of Europe does not include Romania. And the superiority complex, entertaining as it is as a cultural phenomenon, is not a substitute for the harder work of institutional construction that both countries, each in its own way and at its own pace, still have ahead of them.

Photo source: PxHere.com.