Bulgarian Socialist Party congress elects party’s new leader
In a second-round vote on February 16, the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) congress elected acting leader and Deputy Prime Minister Atanas Zafirov as the party’s leader.
Zafirov got 422 votes, defeating his colleague in the coalition Cabinet in which the BSP is a minority partner, Borislav Gutsanov, who got 365 votes.
The leadership election contest began with a field of 17 candidates, which after withdrawals shrank to seven, and the second-round vote was held after Zafirov and Gutsanov emerged with the largest share of votes in the first round.
Zafirov has been elected to the National Assembly nine times on the BSP ticket, serving as chairperson of Parliament’s defence committee in the 46th and 47th National Assemblies.
He has a master’s degrees in national security from GS Rakovski Military Academy and finance from St. St. Kiril and Metodi Veliko Turnovo University. He has been a member of the BSP national council since 2008.
He became a deputy leader of the BSP in 2020, at the time Kornelia Ninova was its leader.
Ninova resigned as leader of the BSP last year after the poor performance of the party in the June 2024 early parliamentary elections, then the latest in a long line of defeats for the once-significant party, the lineal successor of the Bulgarian Communist Party.
As acting leaders of the BSP, Zafirov and Gutsanov led the Bulgarian Socialist Party – United Left coalition into the most recent parliamentary elections, in October 2024, winning 20 seats in the 240-seat House, but becoming part of a coalition government elected with the mandate of Boiko Borissov’s centre-right GERB-UDF coalition.
On being elected BSP leader, Zafirov said that his goal was to make the party once again Bulgaria’s first political force, and said that he would be “first among equals” in the BSP.
(Photos: BSP)
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