Newly elected prime minister and former Bulgarian President Radev has become the first since 1994 to win a parliamentary majority after eight elections in five years. Hoping to bring to an end a period of profound volatility in the Balkan country’s politics.

While he was President of Bulgaria, Radev spoke out about the supply of Bulgaria’s military stockpiles to Kyiv, arguing that his country’s support prolongs a war that is unwinnable for Ukraine. As far back as 2021, Ukraine summoned the Bulgarian ambassador after Radev argued that Crimea was “currently Russian”. Following his landslide victory, Radev spoke about the need for Europe to pursue “pragmatic action and results”. 

However, in spite of his warm words for Russia, Bulgaria’s position as the poorest member state of the EU makes it uniquely reliant on EU funds. Following the country's transition into a parliamentary democracy in 1990, Bulgaria has received around 3% of its GDP and 7% of the state budget from grants by the EU, the US, the UK, and Japan and others. Following the COVID-19 crisis, the EU earmarked over €6 billion for Bulgaria, equivalent to around 6% of the country’s annual GDP.

Given that so much of the total funding is set to be received at the end of this year, it seems unlikely that the newly elected PM would risk suffering a similar fate to Budapest, whose opposition to Ukrainian support led to €17 billion in EU funds being blocked. A €1 billion project announced last year between Sofia and Düsseldorf-based defence contractor Rheinmetall will further calm nerves in Brussels, with thousands of jobs set to be created in the Balkan country. 

The defence industry is hugely important to the Bulgarian economy. In the 1980s, the industry employed hundreds of thousands of people and accounted for 10% of GDP. Following the end of the Cold War, Bulgaria’s defence industry underwent decades of freefall, until Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. Sensing an opportunity, successive governments have supercharged investment into a defence sector which seems primed to benefit from the EU’s new  €150 billion SAFE weapons procurement fund. EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen was bullish on the potential benefits of SAFE to the Bulgarian economy in a visit last August to a Sofia munitions factory. 

Responsible for a third of the weapons transferred to Kyiv by the EU since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, Bulgaria’s defence industry is critical not just to its own economic prosperity but the whole of Europe’s security apparatus. Given Bulgaria's reliance on EU funding and the prospect of further geopolitical and economic opportunities through the EU’s SAFE funding mechanism, diplomats in Brussels appear less concerned about the potentially disruptive influence of the new Russian-friendly regime. 

Speaking to Politico after the election, a senior EU diplomat was quick to argue that Radev was in a "much different league" than Orban. Elsewhere, von der Leyen has already signalled her desire to introduce qualified majority voting on issues of foreign policy to remove the veto power weaponised by Orban during his stint as provocateur-in-chief. While Bulgaria’s new leader may have warm words for the Kremlin, the economic reality in which his country finds itself could render any efforts to block support for Ukraine counterproductive and self-defeating.