Bulgaria’s caretaker government replaces all 28 district governors
At its first meeting, held on February 23, the caretaker government headed by Andrei Gyurov replaced all of Bulgaria’s 28 district governors, the government information service said.
The move comes as Bulgaria heads to early parliamentary elections to be held on April 19, the eighth time since spring 2021 that Bulgarians elect a legislature. Gyurov had pledged that his administration will work to ensure fair elections.
The Gyurov administration is seeking to effect significant changes in the leadership of the Interior Ministry and the prosecution ahead of the elections.
Caretaker Interior Minister Emil Dechev said on February 23 that he had proposed to the interim government, and it had agreed, to ask President Iliyana Yotova to decree the removal from their posts of Interior Ministry chief secretary Miroslav Rashkov and the ministry’s deputy chief secretary Yavor Semerdzhiev.
“As a caretaker government, we don’t have much time to organise fair and lawful elections,” Dechev said.
Dechev said that the Interior Ministry chief secretary is the highest professional position in the department and has an important role in the electoral process.
He cited, as reasons to oust Rashkov, the grave shortcoming in the 2025 municipal elections in Pazardzhik, police conduct during the November 26 2025 protests in Sofia that saw an incident of arson, the absence of the ministry’s leadership in clarifying what happened in the gunfire deaths at the Petrohan chalet, the failure to investigate the threats against the mayor of Bistritsa in July 2025; and Rashkov having failed to pay road traffic fines.
“The chief secretary, who holds the highest position in the Ministry of Interior and should be an example, does not pay his fines for tickets under the Road Traffic Act. Only today, after I ordered an inspection on this issue – with regard to all managers in the ministry, and after the traditional leak of information, were all five paid,” Dechev said.
On February 20, a day after the interim government took office, caretaker Justice Minister Andrey Yankulov said that he was convening a plenary session of the Supreme Judicial Council on February 26, with a single item on the agenda, the election of a new acting Prosecutor-General.
Yankulov pointed to the opinion of the Supreme Court of Cassation that as of July 21 2025, Borislav Sarafov was no longer legitimately performing the functions of Prosecutor-General.
“And a situation in which the supreme judges do not recognise the Prosecutor- General is intolerable in a state governed by the rule of law,” the ministry said.
For more than half a year now, the Prosecutor’s Office – one of the most important state bodies with key powers in law enforcement – has been operating without the necessary guarantees for the accurate and uniform application of the laws by all prosecutors, guarantees that the constitution personalises in the figure of the Prosecutor-General, it said.
This delegitimises and deprives public trust not only in this institution, but also in the justice system in Bulgaria, the statement said.
“In his almost three-year illegitimate ‘de facto term in office’, Borislav Sarafov has not taken a single action that would build public and professional trust in his managerial qualities. He did not fulfill any of his key requests given when he took office,” Yankulov said.
(Photo: government.bg)
