Gen Z led protests force government collapse in Bulgaria

Over 100,000 people have filled the streets of the Bulgarian capital in mass youth-led demonstrations against the rotten, mafia-rule regime. Whilst the protests were initially triggered by the 2026 draft budget – which the government quickly withdrew on 2 December – the protests did not stop. Instead, they gained momentum and forced the government to resign just nine days later!

Representing one of the largest waves of protests in the country’s history, the inspiring mobilisations have been supported across the country by students, public sector workers, and have even linked up with the ongoing struggle of medical workers for higher wages. A recent poll found that over 70 percent of Bulgarians support the protests.

In these unprecedented protests, we see a glimpse of what real democracy looks like. It is not based on parliamentary musical chairs, but on methods of mass struggle and the mobilisation of the working majority of society and the youth. Bulgaria’s youth have taken inspiration from the Gen Z protests this autumn, with many signs reading ‘you angered the wrong generation’, ‘Gen Z vs. corruption’, and ‘Gen Z is coming’.

Importantly, this layer of society has no memory of the collapse of Stalinism in the 1990s. All they have seen is that capitalism in Bulgaria is a sham. The depth of the youth’s anger and their mistrust towards the establishment has now been fully revealed.

A rotten system

The 2026 budget was an attempt to increase taxes to finance public spending – in other words, partly to squeeze small businesses for revenue, but mainly to make the working class and youth pay for the social and economic crisis of Bulgarian capitalism. This comes alongside Bulgaria’s adoption of the euro on 1 January, which is already set to inflate prices.

There is a widespread understanding that the economy has long been plundered by parasitic oligarchs, with young people also holding up signs at the recent protests claiming ‘Bulgaria doesn’t belong to pigs’. A 24-year-old shop worker told reporters she joined the protests because widespread corruption had become “intolerable”. The 2026 budget would have worsened conditions for workers and youth who would be hit hard by the hikes to taxes, and it was evident that the budget was rigged in order to line the pockets of the big capitalists, at the expense of workers and small businesses.

Bulgaria is already one of Europe’s poorest and most corrupt countries. The anger felt by the masses runs deeper than just their opposition to the current cabinet, they see systemic problems built into the DNA of the entire establishment.

The anger felt by the masses runs deeper than just their opposition to the current cabinet / Image: fair use

Now potentially facing its eighth general election in four years, this government’s resignation is nothing more than a reshuffling of the deck of dysfunctional cards. No government has been able to solve the fundamental problems facing society and has been just as corrupt as the last. Hence, we are now, once again, seeing the beginning of the all-too familiar cycle of the installation of an unelected caretaker government of technocrats, followed by new elections, and the failure of the establishment to form a stable ruling majority. This will in all likelihood lead to the eventual collapse of the incoming cabinet through a vote of no-confidence, as has been the case many times in recent years.

Government manoeuvers

Just before the government collapsed, it drafted a ‘revised’ budget for 2026 – which has scandalously been endorsed by the trade unions.

As is to be expected, it did not fundamentally differ from the defeated budget and represented a cynical manoeuver by the government to buy time in the face of escalating protests. Rather than aiming to raise living standards, it sought to obediently meet the requirements for joining the eurozone dictated by the EU’s capitalist and imperialist interests. This meant expanding government debt tied to eurozone entry, record military spending in line with NATO goals, and preparation for austerity that forces workers to shoulder the cost of the debt crisis that the entire EU is sunk in, all while shielding big capital and the oligarchs.

The largest spending item was set to be military expenditure. Defence spending is set to rise to €2.7 billion, pushing Bulgaria’s military spending to 2.25 percent of GDP, in line with NATO requirements. The ruling class will come under pressure to further increase military spending in coming years, with NATO’s target set at five percent of GDP within a decade. All of this will be at the expense of social spending.

Whilst there had been a concession in the 2026 budget to increase public sector wages by 10 percent, this came at the expense of cuts elsewhere, such as slashing funding to medical workers by 75 percent, which added fuel to the fire of the protest movement.

The outgoing government has now announced that an emergency ‘extension budget’ will ensure ‘critical state functions’ continue without disruption until the elections.

Judging by their approach to the ‘revised’ budget, the ‘extension budget’ will offer just as little to the workers and youth leading the protests. The protest movement must be armed with a perspective that, without further escalation and the broadening of the movement to new layers of the working class – the class which has the power to paralyse the functioning of society in order to strike concessions from the capitalists – the ruling class will claw its way back into control of the situation and force through a budget one way or another.

The next mass protest is planned for this week – this time against Bulgaria’s entry to the eurozone, which over half of Bulgarians do not support, sensing it is not in their interests.

Bulgarian capitalism is in crisis and cannot find a stable government to represent it. Every new government seeks to improve the economic situation by imposing austerity, but it cannot do so without provoking resistance. This is a problem across the entire EU, from the core countries such as France, to the peripheral economies, where the blows are felt most sharply. With deeper integration into the eurozone, far from finding itself in a haven of democracy and stability, Bulgaria will be drawn further into this general crisis of European capitalism.

Severe political crisis

The widely-hated regime, dominated by the corrupt figureheads Borissov (former long-standing mafia-style prime minister) and Peevski (a media mogul attached to the DPS party, currently sanctioned under the US and UK Magnitsky acts), has been in power for most of the period since 2009 – spanning the entire political lives of the younger layer of protesters.

Borissov’s party has been repeatedly challenged, most notably in the last wave of protests five years ago. This movement gave rise to a series of so-called ‘protest parties’ which were fundamentally no different to the rest of the establishment – including ‘We Continue the Change - Democratic Bulgaria’ (PP-DB), who are the current leading opposition.

PP-DB has opportunistically placed itself at the head of the protest movement. Under the ultra-hypocritical banner of ‘anti-corruption’, they served to mobilise middle-class supporters primarily against the increase in the dividend tax and social-security contributions proposed in the budget. With the help of the media, these measures were even presented as ‘social’ or ‘left-wing’, and a cause of the economic instability and inflation that will accompany adoption of the euro.

While briefly part of a ruling coalition in 2023-24 (with Borissov’s party, GERB!), PP-DB used the security services as a weapon against their rivals, in exactly the same way the likes of Peevski do. Now they are entangled in corruption scandals of their own: wherever they managed to displace Borissov's corruption networks, they simply installed their own people!

Bulgarian capitalism is in crisis and cannot find a stable government to represent it / Image: Houses of the Oireachtas, Wikimedia Commons

This flows directly from their class base and social outlook. Unlike GERB and DPS, which function primarily as mafia-style business machines rooted in patronage and oligarchic control, PP-DB expresses the ideology and interests of the urban liberal bourgeoisie, that is, the upper middle class, managerial layers, and NGO networks.

Their politics are shaped by hostility to workers’ organisations and by the technocratic conviction that society should be governed ‘by the experts’, schooled at Harvard and on Wall Street, against the majority.

Although they present themselves as ‘modern liberals’, in reality they are ideologically rigid right-wingers, staunch supporters of the EU and NATO, who in practice act aggressively against workers and the poor. Just a few months ago, their support base mobilised people in Sofia against public-transport workers, even organising a protest under the slogan “No to the priority of low-skilled labor over knowledge”, where they demanded that ‘low-skilled’ transport workers should not be paid more than doctors and other professionals!

Whilst PP-DB aims to force new elections and to step in as the ones ‘competent’ enough to govern Bulgaria through the euro-adoption, the protest movement has developed beyond their limited programme, including against Bulgaria’s entry into the eurozone. This shows that PP-DB will struggle to gain much control over the mood of workers and youth.

The task of communists is not to support one wing of the ruling class or to place our hopes in ‘protest parties’, but to build an independent, organised, and politically conscious force of the working class.

Only such an organisation, armed with a clear socialist programme, can transform spontaneous anger into sustained struggle that can challenge the entire system that produced this budget and corruption in the first place.