Boyko Borisov
Boyko Borisov was prime minister of Bulgaria three times, in 2009-13, 2014-17 and 2017-21, the longest-serving of the democracy, the fireman, bodyguard and karate coach who had guarded Zhivkov after his fall and Simeon Saxe-Coburg on his return. He ran the interior ministry's police as its chief secretary in 2001-05, was mayor of Sofia from 2005, and founded his party GERB, Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, in 2006 as the anti-corruption party. He won every election from 2009 to 2021 without ever governing with a majority. The twelve years were the motorways built with the European funds, the Sofia metro, the budget kept balanced and the debt the lowest in the Union. There was the entry into the euro's waiting room and the Schengen area begun, the gas pipeline from Turkey, and the nuclear plant at Belene cancelled and revived and cancelled. There was the judiciary that the Commission's reports found unreformed every year for a decade, and the media that fell to a hundred and eleventh in the world index. There were the protests of the summer of 2020 that lasted a hundred days over the photographs of his bedside drawer with bundles of five-hundred-euro notes and a pistol, which he said were staged. He resigned in 2013 after protests over electricity bills and in 2017 after his candidate lost the presidency to Radev, and both times came back. He was born in Bankya outside Sofia in 1959, the son of an interior ministry officer, trained as a fire engineer at the police academy, taught there, and left in 1990 to found a security company that guarded the fallen dictator. He came into the state through Saxe-Coburg's government, whose interior ministry he made the country's most visible institution with televised raids. The election of April 2021 gave GERB the most seats and no partners. The country then held seven elections in three years, with the anti-corruption coalition of Petkov and Denkov governing briefly in between, until in January 2025 a GERB-led government under Zhelyazkov, with Borisov behind it, took office and took Bulgaria into the euro on 1 January 2026. It fell in December 2025 to the largest protests since 1997, over the budget and the influence of the sanctioned oligarch Peevski, whose votes it had needed. He was arrested for a night in March 2022 by Petkov's government and released without charge. He remains the leader of the largest party and the man nobody can govern with or without.
- Lived: 1959 CE – ?
- Nationality: Bulgarian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
