From Democratic Backsliding to Post-Democracy: the Ir/reversibility of Democratic Decline in Bulgaria

In the past four years Bulgaria has witnessed continued political instability and turmoil, unrivaled even by the early years of democratic transition. Six parliamentary elections, four care-taker governments, and three short-lived regular governments later, Bulgaria is looking at entering 2026 and the Eurozone without a regular government and yet another early parliamentary election. Parallel to the rise of populism witnessed across Europe, Bulgaria has also experienced gradual but steady democratic decline. Democratic backsliding defined as the gradual decline in the quality of democracy and the erosion of democratic institutions (Luhrmann/Lindberg 2019), as well as the decrease in accountability and the concentration of power (Huq/Ginsburg 2018), while relevant is not sufficient to fully explain the Bulgarian case. Our original contribution to the theorization of democratic backsliding is through the prism of post-democracy (Krasteva 2019, 2023; Krasteva/Todorov 2020). We build on Crouch’s conception of post-democracy, according to which democratic institutions—such as elections and parliaments—remain in place, but their function is hollowed out. Real power shifts towards elites, corporations, and unelected actors, while public participation diminishes and the citizenry becomes passive (Crouch 2004). The theoretical framework of the paper is structured around the triangle of populism (“thin” ideology, charismatic leadership, loose party structures), political crisis (objective or constructed), and post-democracy. To analyze these interconnected phenomena, we forward an original conceptualization of three transformations – democratic, national-populist, and post-democratic – each characterized by its own symbolic-ideological hegemony, degree of intentionality, and dynamic interplay between elites and citizens (Krasteva and Todorov). The East European democratic transformations of the 1990s established liberal democracy as the dominant political horizon across Europe, marked by political pluralization, market liberalization, and EU integration in the East, alongside democratic consolidation in the South and deepening integration in the West. The national-populist transformation emerged in the 2000s as radical right parties challenged the democratic consensus, mainstreaming exclusionary politics centered on identitarianism, sovereignty claims, and anti-immigration rhetoric. The post-democratic transformation, increasingly visible over the past decade, represents the hollowing out of democratic institutions through state capture, rising inequality, and citizen alienation, where democratic forms persist but power shifts to non-transparent elite networks. These transformations are not strictly chronological stages but overlapping and interacting logics that coexist across European contexts, with different transformations achieving hegemony at different moments and in different countries. We are most interested in the ir/reversability of these political dynamics. Are populists here to stay or can they be ousted? If so, can anti-populist actors endure or not? Is post-democracy a new political reality that we must reckon with or can democracy withstand and recover from its current state of erosion and decline. Questions that are hard to answer empirically as events are unfolding, but that hold important theoretical potential.