Bulgarian Socialist Party elects Krum Zarkov as its new leader

The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) elected lawyer Krum Zarkov as its new leader on February 7, following the resignation from the post of Atanas Zafirov.

In the vote at a special congress of the BSP, Zarkov got 416 votes, defeating Borislav Gutsanov, who got 302, and Rusi Statkov – an 70-year-old BSP veteran who lost his seat in Parliament in the June 2001 elections – who got all of three.

Like Zafirov, Gutsanov holds a portfolio in the outgoing coalition government of Bulgaria, which resigned in December 2025, while the country is heading towards it latest early parliamentary elections, the date of which is yet to be decreed.

Zarkov, 43, is a former BSP MP and was caretaker Minister of Justice in an interim administration appointed in 2022 by then-president Roumen Radev, who twice held office as head of state with the backing of socialists and nationalists.

In 2025, Zarkov resigned as legal counsel to Radev when the then-head of state put forward his proposal for an unconstitutional referendum on Bulgaria’s accession to the euro.

In 2026, Radev resigned as president, in a move expected to be followed by his entry into the parliamentary political contest, with the shape of his political project still unclear, but observed warily by other political forces, including the BSP.

The BSP, while part of the January 2025 coalition government as a minority partner, has long since hardly been a shadow of the significant political force it once was. A recent poll by Market Links gave it as having 5.5 per cent support among those who would vote, and one by Alpha Research, 4.9 per cent. Those polls were done before Radev stepped down as president, complicating the possible outcome for the next parliamentary elections.

Zarkov, speaking after his election, said: “I consider this victory a common cause, it is a victory over apathy and a sense of resignation.

“It would not have been possible if there was no life in the BSP. Not only is nothing lost, the big thing is now beginning,” Zarkov said.

Though it has been part of a few coalition governments in the past two decades, the BSP – the successor-in-title to the Bulgarian Communist Party that held the country in its oppressive thrall under a past regime, that fell more than 36 years ago – has been in steady decline, under the party’s respective leaders since 2001, including Sergei Stanishev, Mihail Mikov, Kornelia Ninova, and Zafirov.