Monday 2 November 2026
Iliana Iotova wins Bulgaria's presidential runoff with 57.6 percent and becomes the country's first elected female head of state
Bulgaria's acting president, Iliana Iotova, won Sunday's presidential runoff, near final results from the Central Election Commission showed on Monday. With 99.95 percent of precinct protocols processed as of November 2, the Iotova and Valchev ticket had 57.58 percent of the vote, about 1.1 million ballots, against 39.47 percent, about 749,500 ballots, for Andrey Gyurov and Georgi Kandev. About 2.95 percent of voters chose the option to support no one. Turnout was low. Iotova, formerly the vice president, has run the presidency on an acting basis since January, when President Rumen Radev resigned to enter the parliamentary race.
The runoff was closer in the first round than in the second. On October 25, Iotova and her running mate led with 34.6 percent against 32 percent for Gyurov's ticket, short of the majority needed to win outright. A week later the gap had more than doubled. The campaign ran through Bulgaria's argument about Ukraine and about how close Sofia should stand to Moscow, with Gyurov running as the pro Western candidate.
Iotova's win completes a strange year at the top of the Bulgarian state. Radev resigned the presidency in January to lead a parliamentary ticket, which he won, on a platform many analysts describe as Kremlin friendly. His vice president stepped up as acting president, and the voters have now given her the office in her own right, for a full term, as the first woman elected to it. Bulgaria's president is head of state with a limited constitutional role, but the office names caretaker governments when parliament fails, and Bulgarian parliaments have been failing often. Who holds it matters most exactly when the rest of the system stops working.
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