The Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), also known as The Centenarian, is a centre-left, social democratic political party in Bulgaria. The BSP is a member of the Socialist International, Party of European Socialists, and Progressive Alliance. Although founded in 1990 in its modern form, it traces its political heritage back to the founding of the BRSDP in 1891. It is also Bulgaria's largest party by membership numbers.
History The Centenarian moniker comes from the fact that the BSP is recognized as the successor of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Party, which was founded on 2 August 1891 on Buzludzha peak by Dimitar Blagoev, designated in 1903 as the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Narrow Socialists), and later as the Bulgarian Communist Party. After the political changes brought by the Revolutions of 1989, it abandoned Marxism–Leninism and refounded itself as the BSP in April 1990.
The party formed a government after the 1990 Bulgarian Constitutional Assembly election but was forced to resign after a general strike that December. A non-partisan government led by Dimitar Iliev Popov took over until the 1991 Bulgarian parliamentary election later in October. In the aftermath, the party was confined to opposition. As part of the Democratic Left coalition, a forerunner of the BSP for Bulgaria, it helped form a new government in 1995, headed by BSP leader Zhan Videnov as the prime minister of Bulgaria. Large-scale demonstrations in the cities and a general strike prevented the formation of a new socialist government after its term ended at the end of 1996. The country had entered into a spiral of hyperinflation, the most serious economic and financial crisis in its recent history, after the shock therapy and privatization policies, also followed to various degrees by other post-Communist countries.
In the 2001 Bulgarian presidential election, party chairman Georgi Parvanov was elected the president of Bulgaria on the second round, defeating on the second ballot incumbent candidate Petar Stoyanov from the Union of Democratic Forces (SDS). Parvanov resigned as party chairman and was succeeded by Sergey Stanishev. It was a break of the two-party system between the BSP and the SDS.
After two full terms out of power (1997–2001), the BSP-led Coalition for Bulgaria won the 2005 Bulgarian parliamentary election with 31.0% of the vote but without a governing majority, and formed the Stanishev Government, headed by the prime minister and BSP chairman Stanishev, with the centrist and social-liberal parties National Movement Simeon II and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), respectively. In the 2006 Bulgarian presidential election, Parvanov was re-elected in a landslide, becoming the first Bulgarian president to do so in direct elections. In 2007, Bulgaria joined the European Union. The governing BSP-led coalition lost millions of euros of financial aid in the wake of allegations of widespread political corruption. The cabinet was also unable to react to the 2008 financial crisis and its term ended with a budget deficit after several successive surplus years.
In the 2009 Bulgarian parliamentary election, the BSP was defeated by the new conservative party GERB, obtaining 37 out of 240 parliamentary seats (18%), and went into opposition. GERB assumed power through an anti-communist and anti-Turkish platform, calling the previous BSP-led government communist even though, as written in Jacobin by sociologist Jana Tsoneva, that government "had introduced some of the most radical neoliberal policies." In the 2013 Bulgarian parliamentary election, the party took 30.6% of the votes, second is GERB with 26.5%. Plamen Oresharski, the party's candidate for prime minister, and the Oresharski Government were elected with the parliament support of the BSP and the DPS. The appointment of the controversial media mogul Delyan Peevski as head of the state security agency DANS sparked large-scale protests on 14 June. Protests against the Oresharski cabinet continued until the government resigned. In the 2017 Bulgarian parliamentary election, the BSP made big gains but not enough to govern, as GERB made smaller gains as well, and the party remained in opposition to the Third Borisov Government, which included the far right United Patriots.
The BSP supported the 2020–2021 Bulgarian protests and led the left-wing opposition for a failed non-confidence vote. The protests ended when the prime minister Boyko Borisov resigned, but results after the April 2021 Bulgarian parliamentary election proved to be fragmented. After failed attempts from the BSP to form a government in the aftermath of an inconclusive July 2021 Bulgarian parliamentary election, the political crisis continued, as no government without the participation of Borissov could be formed, despite an anti-GERB majority. In addition, Korneliya Ninova, the party leader since 2016, has faced internal struggle, as the party has not been in government since 2016; the BSP has hesitated, depending on public opinion, between backing and rejecting There Is Such a People, the populist party created ahead of the anti-government protests and with the most seats. A third snap election for November 2021, this time also at the presidential level (2021 Bulgarian general election), ensued to solve the crisis. Following the election, Ninova decided to step down again although she will remain the chairman of BSP until the next party congress which will be held in January.
BSP agreed to be a part of the Petkov Government, together with PP, ITN and DB, receiving the ministries of social care, healthcare, agriculture and economy, with Chairwoman Korneliya Ninova also receiving the position of Deputy Prime Minister.
During the January Congress, Ninova's resignation was rejected, meaning that Ninova continued on as Chairwoman of the BSP, until the end of her mandate in 2024.
In the 2026 Bulgarian parliamentary election the BSP lost all of its seats. Before that, in February, it elected Krum Zarkov as its new Chairperson on a platform calling for a return to the party's socialist roots. After his election he published a manifesto entitled “The Socialism of Our Century” and toured the country, seeking to win the membership of the BSP over to his vision of a renewed and decidedly more socialist BSP.
Ideology Founded as the legal successor to the Bulgarian Communist Party, the BSP describes itself as a democratic socialist party, espousing socialist policies and values, while supporting a social market economy. It has also been described as a populist and social-democratic party. The party's policies have oscillated during its existence from a customary understanding of socialism during the Videnov era, to a more social-liberal worldview under Stanishev, to a socially conservative strain of socialism under Ninova. The party also got described as national communist.
Like most Party of European Socialists (PES) member parties, the BSP has a pro-European stance, although it has taken some Eurosceptic positions and called for an end to sanctions against Russia. Some news outlets, such as Novinite, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, have described its orientation as soft Russophilia.
In recent times under the leadership of Korneliya Ninova and unlike the majority of PES parties, the BSP has been described as more conservative on social issues, and like European Union politics it is more divided, with some leaders, such as Ninova, opposing same-sex marriage in Bulgaria. Many party leaders opposed the Istanbul Convention because they were against educating children about sexuality if it also meant same-sex relationships, and after a long debate decided to vote against it, despite internal division about it. Former BSP leader and then-PES head Sergey Stanishev strongly supported the Istanbul Convention. Under Ninova's leadership, BSP additionally shifted to a more nationalist position.
Membership The party is the largest in Bulgaria by number of members, having 105,000 members as of 2016, down from 130,000 in 2013, 150,000 in 2012, 210,000 in 2009, 250,000 in 1996, and around 1 million members during the late period of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. In 2020, it had 80,236 members.
List of chairmen No.Name(birth–death)PortraitTerm of office1Aleksandar Lilov(1933–2013) 3 April 1990 12 December 1991 2Zhan Videnov(born 1959) 12 December 1991 21 December 1996 3Georgi Parvanov(born 1957) 21 December 1996 5 December 2001 4Sergey Stanishev(born 1966) 5 December 2001 27 July 2014 5Mihail Mikov(born 1960) 27 July 2014 8 May 20166Korneliya Ninova(born 1969) 8 May 2016 15 June 2024 7 Atanas Zafirov(born 1971) 15 June 2024 7 February 2026 8 Krum Zarkov(born 1982) 7 February 2026
Videnov era During the chairmanship of Zhan Videnov, the party followed the customary line for socialist parties – it rejected the large-scale privatization efforts of the SDS and instead moved toward a "mass" or "social" privatization campaign, which was intended to allow working and middle-class individuals ("the masses") to obtain stocks in various enterprises earmarked for privatization, as opposed to those shares only being sold to private investors on the stock market. The party under Videnov opposed what was perceived as the strong political and economic over-reliance on the United States, and instead sought to foster more friendly relations with the neighbouring PASOK-ruled Greece and SPS-ruled FR Yugoslavia.
Parvanov era Parvanov, who had also been on the Bulgarian-Greek Parliamentary Friendship Committee, and was later elected as president of Bulgaria, chose to keep a degree of public distancing between party and state institutions and instead resigned his membership in the party following his elections. Though the Bulgarian constitution requires the President to resign any leadership positions within political parties, it does not require the officeholder to give up his party membership completely. He instead hand-picked Sergey Stanishev as his successor for the position. During his chairmanship, however, he opposed the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. He stated that this was not a position against NATO, but only against its military operation. He stated that he would support Bulgaria's entry into NATO, but insisted that such an accession should only happen after negotiations with Russia. Though he was considered a member of the party's liberal wing, Parvanov also reached out to its more left-wing members and restored the party membership of Todor Zhivkov, who ruled the country for over 30 years during the socialist period and who was still very popular among socialists.
After having successfully completed two presidential terms, he re-joined the socialist party and initially put himself forward for another mandate as chairman, but withdrew it before the party's congress in 2012. Two years later, he was expelled from the party for "damaging its prestige", which he condemned as an authoritarian decision by the party's authorities. He then became the first former chairman to found his own separate party – the Alternative for Bulgarian Revival.
Stanishev era