Peevski Über Alles: Political Turmoil in Bulgaria

Over the past week, Bulgaria has witnessed a political storm that raises serious concerns about the state of democracy in the country. At the center of this growing turmoil stands Delyan Peevski — a controversial power broker whose consolidation of influence is alarming citizens, experts, and Bulgaria’s European partners alike.

While Bulgaria has officially entered the Schengen area (as of January 1, 2025) and is preparing for eurozone accession in 2026, internal political developments threaten to erode trust in the country as a stable and reliable EU member. Instead of deepening integration and governance reform, Bulgaria risks backsliding — a trajectory that could isolate it within the Union and undermine the benefits of European membership.

Several developments unfolding in parallel now demand urgent public attention:

The Failed Attempt to Lift Magnitsky Sanctions

Efforts to remove Delyan Peevski from the U.S. Global Magnitsky sanctions list — imposed in 2021 for serious corruption — have collapsed. Despite active lobbying by Boyko Borissov and the Bulgarian foreign ministry, including appeals to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and even to Donald Trump Jr., Washington has remained silent. This silence is deafening: the sanctions stand.

The failure reveals the limits of backchannel diplomacy and exposes the myth that alignment with Trump-style politics offers immunity. Trumpism might be transactional, but it’s not universal — and it has failed to shield Peevski from the long arm of U.S. law.

Peevski’s Plan B: Seize the State

With the sanctions immovable, Peevski appears to have shifted to Plan B: consolidate his grip on power domestically by any means necessary. The strategy is already visible — sideline critics, dominate institutions, and expand control over both legislative and executive branches.

The vehicle for this consolidation is his “New Beginning” movement, designed to overtake not only Bulgaria’s reformist opposition but potentially to absorb or displace GERB entirely. What began as an informal alliance with Boyko Borissov is morphing into a hostile takeover. GERB may soon find itself either hollowed out or fully captured.

The working hypothesis within Peevski’s camp is clear: the best path to lifting U.S. sanctions is to accumulate official political power. His ambition appears to include a senior post—possibly even prime minister. The reasoning is bluntly pragmatic: the United States, facing a fait accompli, may be compelled to “recalibrate” if Peevski occupies a position of formal leadership within a NATO ally’s government.

This scenario follows the Hungarian precedent, where Viktor Orbán’s chief of staff was quietly removed from the Magnitsky list after taking up a top official post. For Peevski, this isn’t just a possibility—it’s the plan. He is openly displaying his ascent through increasingly frequent photo ops with mayors and local leaders. Notably, these might no longer exclusively come from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), but also from GERB—a clear signal that his influence now reaches deep into what was once his rival’s base.

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Consolidating support at the local level is key—but this requires financing: through the national budget, entrenched corruption networks, and the increasingly strategic “border business.”

Schengen, the Eurozone, and the Border Business

Bulgaria’s formal entry into Schengen and preparation for eurozone accession should be milestones of institutional maturity. Yet behind the façade of integration lies a darker reality—one that risks undermining the very foundations of its European project.

Peevski’s growing dominance raises serious doubts about Bulgaria’s ability to safeguard the financial and political integrity of the EU’s southeastern flank. Through his grip over the security services, customs, and intelligence, a shadow economy thrives: sanctions against Russia are circumvented; trafficking of goods, people, and drugs flows unchecked; and corruption at border checkpoints becomes a source of political capital.

Schengen has, predictably, given a boost to the gray economy. Border permeability—strategically managed—has become a cash cow. For Peevski, this isn’t collateral nuissance; it is the engine of his political project.

In effect, Bulgaria’s most vulnerable institutions are being turned into instruments for entrenching power, financed not by public trust or electoral support, but by illicit flows and backroom deals. The border—Europe’s gate—has become the foundation of a domestic political architecture that trades sovereignty for influence and turns integration into extraction.

A Familiar Script, Higher Stakes

We’ve seen this script before. In the early 2000s, Boyko Borissov leveraged his underworld connections into political capital. But Peevski’s gambit is more audacious. He operates with more powerful allies, under fewer constraints, and at a moment when geopolitical uncertainty weakens the resolve of international actors to confront creeping autocracy.

If unchallenged, the border business will not just fund a political campaign—it will institutionalize a new system of power, where the logic of smuggling and patronage supplants that of democratic accountability.

Where Europe and Bulgaria’s democratic forces see risk, Peevski sees opportunity.

His entire “Prime Minister” project rests on a paradox: that the instability he creates can be transformed into societal and institutional control; that sanctions can be leveraged into status; that European membership can be stripped of values and reduced to a passport for corruption.

Plan B is not merely a fallback strategy. It is the strategy.

The Media Laundromat

In Bulgaria today, much of the mainstream media no longer functions as a watchdog of power but as an extension of it. The media machine—consolidated, obedient, and well-oiled—serves two key functions:

• To rehabilitate Delyan Peevski’s public image,
• And to discredit anyone who stands in his way.

A coordinated narrative is now being pushed across television channels, online platforms, and carefully selected “expert” panels: Peevski is no longer the symbol of entrenched corruption and shadowy power he once was. He is being repackaged as a responsible statesman, a pragmatic operator who “gets things done,” even a patriotic savior—an improbable transformation into Bulgaria’s benevolent “peoples’ Tzar”.

The objective is unmistakable: to prepare public opinion for Peevski’s possible ascension to the premiership. The strategy mirrors the early media playbook used to build up Boyko Borissov in the early 2000s, complete with the same mix of populist imagery, selective silence, and myth-making.

But the road is steep. According to polling data from 2024, more than 87% of Bulgarians disapprove of Peevski. No amount of media spin can easily erase a legacy tied to years of public distrust, sanctions, and suspected crimes. That’s why the PR campaign is only one side of the coin. The other is far more sinister: an aggressive push to destroy public dissent.

Praise for the Leader, Persecution for Dissent

What we are witnessing is not just an attempt to rehabilitate Peevski. It is an effort to build a controlled political environment, one where praise is amplified and criticism is punished.

This involves classic authoritarian tactics:

• Media glorification, bordering on a cult of personality;
• Institutional pressure on opponents via the prosecutor’s office and security services;
• Smear campaigns against protest organizers, independent journalists, and civic activists.

You won’t see Peevski in open debate. He doesn’t participate in interviews with independent journalists. He speaks only on his terms, at his chosen time, and only on issues that serve his agenda. He operates more like a monarch than a public servant. This curated silence is not a flaw—it is the strategy. In the vacuum left by real scrutiny, media can inflate his image, dressing mediocrity as dignity and presenting blind ambition as patriotic vision.

But this is not happening unopposed.

Memory, Resistance, and the Fight for the Narrative

Despite the institutional deadlock, Bulgaria still has an active civil society. Many remember the protests of 2013 and 2020—uprisings in which Peevski’s face became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the country’s political system. That memory lives on. And so, the media machine has a second job: to degrade public resistance.

The tactics in eroding trust in the new protests are familiar:

• “The leaders are compromised”
• “Now’s not the time.”
• “Someone must be funding them.”
• “Why always Peevski?”

These aren’t just lazy talking points. They are part of a deliberate divide-and-rule strategy, aimed at discrediting opposition, sowing doubt, and weakening solidarity.

This is how power consolidates itself in Bulgaria in 2025—not through a coup, but through control of narrative, erosion of dissent, and the quiet normalization of the unacceptable.

When the Carrot Fails, Enter the Stick — and the Media

With the failure of the soft approach—bribes, appeasement, and attempts to legitimize his role through public image campaigns—Delyan Peevski is now moving decisively to Plan C: repression.

This shift is hardly surprising. Peevski has long relied on coercion when persuasion fails. His recent recruitment of former Interior Minister Kalin Stoyanov—who infamously declared that “the streets will no longer determine who governs”—was a clear signal. At the same time, Peevski has sharply increased the salaries of the security and law enforcement apparatus, creating a loyal base within the repressive state institutions. Meanwhile, a well-paid cadre of media figures, political operatives, and so-called “influence brokers” stand ready to silence dissent and organize counter-protests when needed.

A controlled media environment is essential to this project. It doesn’t just manufacture consent—it masks scandals, buries investigations, and numbs public outrage. The media laundromat becomes a backbone of the regime, filtering reality and ensuring that what remains is a flattering illusion of order and strength.

In Peevski’s concept of power, there is no room for equal partners—only subordinates. Ahmed Dogan learned this the hard way. Now, Boyko Borissov is learning it too.

Peevski’s Parallel State

What Peevski is building is not a government—it’s an architecture of control. His core power base includes:

• Individuals who manage border business and smuggling networks,
• Enablers within customs, law enforcement, and intelligence,
• Corrupt patronage systems that funnel money and loyalty upward.

The structure is pyramidic, autocratic, and deeply entrenched in informal, often illegal flows of capital. Independent media, civic institutions, and democratic checks have no place in it. What replaces them is a shadow state, where political ambition is funded by organized crime, and democratic language is hollowed out for display.

The Orbán Connection: A Geopolitical Realignment

On the international front, Peevski has found a new political role model and ally: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

As GERB’s influence in the European People’s Party wanes, Peevski is positioning himself as the new Bulgarian emissary to the rising illiberal right in Europe. His party, New Beginning, is expected to join Orbán’s far-right group in the European Parliament, signifying a shift away from traditional pro-European conservatism toward a homegrown brand of authoritarian populism.

This transformation is not purely ideological—it is strategic. Peevski is effectively co-opting Borissov’s clientelist machine, including the symbolic husk of the SDS (Union of Democratic Forces), to consolidate his grip over the mainstream right. But instead of strengthening Bulgaria’s ties to the EU, this new alliance accelerates a drift toward “illiberal democracy”—a euphemism for autocratic rule under a democratic façade.

Orbán’s model—centralized power, institutional capture, and election rigging—is not just admired by Peevski. It is the template for his own ambitions. Given the high levels of public distrust and his toxic reputation, this model may be the only one that allows him to stay in power.

Smuggling, Sovereignty, and the Specter of Authoritarianism

Peevski’s political ascent is underwritten by vast illicit revenues, especially from smuggling routes across the Turkish border and through the Black Sea ports of Varna and Burgas. These flows provide not just funding but leverage—an informal economy of corruption that can be turned into political capital, essential in tradeoffs with Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey.

Wrapped in the rhetoric of “patriotic conservatism,” he sells himself as Bulgaria’s analogue of Orbán and Trump. But the reality is far more dangerous: a slide toward a domestic authoritarianism, closer to the mutra’s model of unaccountable rule and elite impunity.

European institutions are beginning to take note. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched multiple investigations—some involving figures like Vladimir Malinov, others possibly reaching Peevski himself. This scrutiny is precisely why Peevski needs power: to turn a personal legal liability into a national standoff, pitting Bulgaria against its European allies.

The Moscow Anchor

With his bid for legitimacy in the West faltering, Delyan Peevski appears ready to reactivate his long-standing ties with Russia—this time with logistical backing from Viktor Orbán and tacit acceptance from Ankara. The Kremlin has every interest in supporting his political ascent as a lever to destabilize Bulgaria from within, especially amid ongoing Western support for Ukraine and widespread domestic discontent with Peevski’s consolidation of power.

One of the clearest signals came with the abrupt freezing of the new gunpowder plant near Smyadovo, a facility expected to expand Bulgarian ammunition exports to Ukraine by the end of 2025. Blocking this project serves as an unambiguous nod to the Kremlin. In contrast, the hypothetical joint venture with Germany’s Rheinmetall—promoted by both Peevski and Borissov—would not be operational for at least three years, if at all.

One is a bird in the hand; the other, an eagle in the sky.

Peevski’s Russia-friendly alignment is not new. OCCRP network investigations have documented his links to Russian companies, media, and political proxies—including the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). Through his control over customs, border police, and key smuggling channels, Peevski offers Moscow a valuable back door for circumventing EU sanctions. The Turkish border and Bulgaria’s Black Sea ports serve not only as conduits for illicit trade but also as gateways for influence operations targeting Southeastern Europe.

Thus far, Peevski has avoided open pro-Russian rhetoric, likely to avoid triggering alarms in Washington. Instead, his proxy networks handle the messaging, allowing him to maintain plausible deniability while benefitting from Kremlin goodwill. This strategy aligns with broader Russian objectives in the region: to weaken institutional resilience, create regulatory loopholes, and expand political influence beneath the surface.

It is no coincidence that Gazprom’s increased profits in 2024 correlate with a surge in gas flows through Bulgaria to Hungary, Slovakia, and Greece—routes that Peevski and his allies quietly control.

Peevski as a Systemic Threat

Delyan Peevski’s rise marks more than the return of a discredited figure—it signals the institutional decay of Bulgarian democracy and a potential geopolitical shift disguised by formal EU and NATO membership – a continuation of Borissov’s policies over the last 20 years.

Much like Viktor Orbán, who turned elections into instruments of one-man rule, Peevski is building a system where repression, media capture, and elite patronage replace genuine political competition. More of the “Trojan horse” within the EU: the epitome of Borissov’s rule – a state that receives European funding but abandons European values.

The threat is not formal exit from the EU, that won’t fly, but Hungarian-type of a hollowed-out membership. A country that stays in the club while working against its principles from within.

As Peevski consolidates power, his personal struggle for survival risks becoming a national crisis, positioning Bulgaria in quiet but growing opposition to the EU at a moment when integration—especially eurozone entry—requires trust, transparency, and rule of law.

This is no longer just about Peevski. It is about whether Bulgaria will resist the authoritarian slide, or be subsumed by it. Whether it will uphold the democratic path its citizens defended in the streets in 2013 and 2020—or abandon it in silence.

The collision between Peevski’s model and the European project is inevitable. The only question is whether Bulgarian society—and its European allies—will act in time to stop it.

Ilian Vassilev