A month before Sunday’s vote, every major pollster had Iliana Yotova at least 17 points ahead of Andrey Gyurov and some had her within reach of 50 percent. When the Central Election Commission announced the official result, the incumbent president had 528,951 votes, or 34.76 percent, against Gyurov‘s 486,232, or 31.95 percent. The gap between them is 42,719 votes, a margin of 2.8 points, and both tickets go into the runoff on November 1 with the race effectively open.
Kostadin Kostadinov of “Revival” came third with 190,910 votes, or 12.55 percent, followed by Radostin Vassilev of MECH with 4.61 percent, Ivelin Mihaylov of “Greatness” with 3.79 percent and Ivan Hristanov with 2.39 percent. Another 67,353 people, 4.43 percent, chose the “I do not support anyone” option. Only 1,525,034 of the 6,584,025 registered voters took part, a turnout of 23.16 percent and the lowest of any national election since the fall of communism.
The headline numbers hide a more interesting story. The result was shaped less by voters changing their minds than by which voters bothered to show up and the biggest group that stayed home was the one that had handed Rumen Radev a parliamentary majority six months earlier.
Radev’s Voters Did Not Come Back
In April, Progressive Bulgaria won 1,444,920 votes and 131 of 240 seats. On Sunday, the candidate it backed received just over a third of that. According to Alpha Research, only about 29 percent of Progressive Bulgaria’s April voters took part in the presidential vote. Alpha’s exit poll found that 74 percent of those backed Yotova, 11 percent Kostadinov and 9 percent Gyurov. Trend’s exit poll puts her share among them slightly lower, at 71.2 percent, with 12.3 percent going to Gyurov.
Relatively few of Radev’s voters defected to her rivals and most of them simply stayed at home. Several explanations are in circulation and they are not mutually exclusive. Six months in government have dented Radev’s standing, with Bulgaria among the three EU countries with the highest inflation and the cabinet’s cautious line on the Black Sea drone strikes drawing criticism. Polls showing a comfortable lead may have persuaded many supporters that their vote was not needed. And several commentators, from DW’s Emiliya Milcheva to Ivan Bedrov in Svobodna Tochka, have questioned how hard Radev himself fought for his former vice president. They point to the case of Sonya Koltuklieva, a reporter for PIK who was knocked to the ground and injured by a National Service for Protection guard escorting Speaker Mihaela Dotsova on October 22. Yotova demanded the resignation of the service’s chief, General Emil Tonev, who submitted it, but his dismissal requires the government’s agreement and Radev declined to give it until an investigation is complete. Tonev remains in post.
Yotova‘s own campaign did not help. The “Petrich Escobar” pardon followed her throughout, as she first leaned on the medical commission’s findings, then had to explain why a prisoner released on health grounds was again under investigation for drug trafficking and finally sent the file to the prosecutors, after which further questions could be refused on the grounds of investigative secrecy. Her refusal to debate before the first round and her pledge that no Bulgarian soldier would go to Ukraine, a decision that belongs to parliament, which ruled out such participation in February 2025, gave her opponents easy targets. As Novinite’s profile put it before the vote, she ran as the status quo, and the status quo turned out to be less popular than the polls suggested.
How Gyurov Closed the Gap
Gyurov did the opposite. We Continue the Change and Democratic Bulgaria won just over 400,000 votes in April, and Gyurov finished on more than 486,000, which means he mobilized his own camp and then reached beyond it. Trend’s exit poll shows him taking 86.2 percent of PP-DB voters and, more significantly, 47.6 percent of the GERB voters who turned out, against 22.9 percent for Yotova. Alpha Research puts the GERB split at 39 percent to 22 percent. Whichever figure is closer, a sizable share of Boyko Borissov’s electorate voted for Gyurov without any instruction from party headquarters.
His map was the map of urban, younger and educated Bulgaria. He won all three Sofia constituencies, taking 88,681 votes to Yotova‘s 35,767 in the 23rd alone, and carried Plovdiv city. Trend found him ahead among every age group under 40, with 42.5 percent among 18 to 29-year-olds, and among university graduates by 39 to 31.7 percent. Abroad he won 45.8 percent to Yotova‘s 22.8 percent, leading in Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, France, Italy and the United States, while Yotova carried Turkey and Kostadinov topped the small count in Russia.
Yotova‘s strength lay where Radev’s had in April: smaller towns, villages and older voters. She won 56.8 percent of the over-70s and almost every province outside the big cities, and in places like Haskovo, Pleven and Vratsa she polled more than double Gyurov‘s vote. Varna was closer, at 33,199 to 31,364. DW noted that Gyurov also benefited from being a comparatively new face, unworn by years in politics, which made him an easier choice for voters looking for an alternative to the governing camp without wanting to return to the old parties. Novinite’s pre-election profile called his offer the balance, and a third of those who voted took it.
A Record Low Turnout and a Boycott in Plain Sight
Turnout of 23.16 percent is the lowest for any election since 1990, far below the previous low of 34.41 percent at the October 2024 parliamentary vote. Only the 2013 referendum on the Belene nuclear plant, at 20.22 percent, drew a smaller share of voters. In April, by comparison, 51 percent of voters had turned out. Pollsters had expected between 36 and 40 percent, and the gap between that forecast and reality explains much of why they misjudged the margin: their samples of likely voters included a large group of Progressive Bulgaria supporters who never arrived.
The drop was steepest in the strongholds of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS). Delyan Peevski’s DPS did not field a candidate and in the week before the vote prosecutors arrested the DPS mayors of Belitsa and Sungurlare on corruption allegations and Kardzhali mayor Erol Mumun was taken in for questioning. Local party structures in Belitsa and Sungurlare called for a boycott. By 4 p.m. turnout stood at 5.65 percent in Belitsa, 5.91 percent in Yakoruda and 6.76 percent across the Kardzhali region. In Turkey, home to many Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin, it fell to 15.95 percent from 34.63 percent in April. Mumun spent the day posting photos from a farmers’ market. Alpha Research estimates that only about 15 percent of April’s DPS voters, roughly 40,000 people, took part nationwide.
The boycott can be read as a demonstration of control, with Peevski showing that he can keep his voters at home as reliably as he can bring them out. Radev offered his own explanation for the low turnout, blaming PP-DB, GERB and DPS for convincing people through their constitutional changes and conduct in government that voting changes nothing.
Kostadinov’s Partial Revenge
For Kostadinov, the result was a qualified success. Pro-Russian and nationalist Revival won 4.19 percent in April after Radev’s new party swept up much of its electorate and on Sunday its leader took three times that share, finishing on 12.55 percent, above every pre-election poll. He fell well short of his prediction of reaching the runoff, finishing more than 295,000 votes behind Gyurov, but the score confirms that part of the nationalist vote Radev borrowed in April is drifting back. Novinite’s profile described his campaign as the vengeance, and he has now collected part of the debt.
Together with Vassilev’s 4.61 percent and Mihaylov’s 3.79 percent, the three candidates can be grouped as the “nationalist vote,” sharing a distrust of the EU and a closer view to Moscow’s on the war in Ukraine, took almost 21 percent. That bloc is now the largest pool of votes in play and its first move has already complicated both finalists’ plans, as the runoff preview explains.
What the First Round Tells Us
The clearest lesson is for Radev. A prime minister who won 1.44 million votes in April could not turn even half of them out for his chosen candidate six months later and whatever the mix of complacency, disappointment and lukewarm campaigning behind that, the government goes into the runoff weaker than it looked a week ago. Lyuben Obretenov wrote in Club Z that “political logic” had returned to Bulgaria after April’s surprise, while Bedrov called the result a yellow card for the prime minister.
It is clear that the round exposed two strategic blunders. Yotova‘s team believed the 20-point leads in the polls and barely campaigned, counting on Radev’s April voters and the Bulgarian Socialist Party and falling back on the familiar attacks that tied opponents to the Petrohan case and to warmongering. Moscow might have made the bigger mistake, striking ships off Romania and Bulgaria in the hope of frightening Bulgarians into backing a candidate seen as closer to the Kremlin. If that was the aim, the exit polls suggest it failed: fear appears to have moved mainly Revival’s voters, toward Kostadinov, while pro-European voters rallied behind Gyurov. There is no evidence that the attacks were timed to influence the vote and Sofia has not formally attributed them, although EU leaders blamed Russia on October 16. The broader point stands on firmer ground. Neither the comfort of incumbency nor the language of fear produced the result the governing camp expected and a large part of the country showed it is not willing to hand every institution to a single political force without a contest.
For the opposition, Gyurov showed that a pro-Western candidate can expand beyond the PP-DB base when the alternative is a single camp controlling every institution and that GERB voters will act on their own when their party gives them no direction.
The turnout also leaves a problem for whoever wins. Fewer than one in four registered voters took part in choosing the two finalists and unless participation rises sharply on Sunday, the next president will take office with the votes of well under a fifth of the electorate. That is a thin mandate for an office whose main authority rests on being the one official the whole country elects.
This article is part of Novinite’s editorial coverage of Bulgaria’s 2026 presidential election. It was not commissioned or paid for by any candidate, party or initiative committee, and it does not endorse anyone.