Sofia, Oct 26. (dpa/GNA) – Bulgaria will hold a run-off next Sunday, to choose its new president, official results from the Central Election Commission (ZIK) showed on Monday, with incumbent Iliana Iotova and her challenger from the pro-Western, liberal-conservative opposition, Andrey Gyurov, going head-to-head.
The official results were published after 99.95% of the votes had been counted. None of the 27 candidates in Sunday’s first round reached the absolute majority needed to be elected.
Incumbent Iotova came first with 34.7% of the votes, followed by Gyurov with 31.9%. According to pre-election polls, Gyurov should not have performed so strongly.
He is an economist with a doctorate and a former interim prime minister.
It is still open how many additional votes Iotova and Gyurov can mobilize for the run-off. It was still unclear on the day after the election where the votes of voters for eliminated candidates would go. To win a run-off, a candidate no longer needs an absolute majority. They only need more votes than their rival.
Prime Minister Rumen Radev, whose centre-left party Progressive Bulgaria (PB) governs alone and supports Iotova, urged Bulgarians on the day after the vote to back her. Radev, who himself served as president between 2017 and earlier this year, was quoted on the government’s official website: “Let us vote for Iliana Iotova so that Bulgaria is in safe hands.”
The Ukraine war on Bulgaria’s doorstep, gives the run-off an important foreign policy dimension. Voters will also decide whether the south-eastern EU country on NATO’s eastern flank pursues a more consistently Western course, as Gyurov’s candidacy would suggest.
The second option would be for Iotova, if re-elected, to represent the cautious foreign policy line of Prime Minister Radev’s government in the presidency.
Iotova was deputy to former president Radev before his resignation from the country’s highest office in January 2026.
GNA