Exit polls put Bulgaria’s Iliana Iotova ahead in presidential runoff, on course to be first elected woman president
Exit polls from Bulgaria’s presidential runoff on Sunday put acting President Iliana Iotova on about 51 to 52.5 per cent against Andrey Gyurov’s roughly 43 to 45 per cent, with official results still to be confirmed.
Exit polls published as voting ended in Bulgaria on Sunday put acting President Iliana Iotova ahead in the country’s presidential runoff, placing her on course to become Bulgaria’s first elected woman head of state if the projections are confirmed by the official count. The result is a projection, not a final result: the Central Election Commission was expected to publish partial results later on Sunday, with the final official outcome due on Monday as ballot papers are counted.
The polls were strikingly consistent. Alpha Research put Iotova on 52.5 per cent and her rival, former caretaker prime minister Andrey Gyurov, on 43.4 per cent, a gap of about 170,000 votes that pollsters said would be very difficult to overturn. Market Links gave Iotova 50.7 per cent against 44 per cent for Gyurov, Trend put her on 51.6 per cent against 43.4 per cent, Gallup International Balkan gave her 51 per cent against 44 per cent, and Myara put her on 51 per cent against 44.7 per cent. Around 5 per cent of voters chose the option of supporting neither candidate, according to Trend and Gallup.
Iotova, 61, has held the presidency on an acting basis after taking over the post earlier this year. Gyurov, 50, a banker and former caretaker prime minister, was backed by the pro-Western opposition. Their tickets also carried running mates: Kiril Valchev stood alongside Iotova, and Georgi Kandev alongside Gyurov. A total of 27 candidate tickets entered the race, and only the two leading tickets from the first round qualified for the runoff.
The first round, held on 25 October, had been far closer and drew a record-low turnout of only about 23 per cent of eligible voters. Iotova finished that round about 2.8 percentage points ahead of Gyurov, with roughly 35 per cent against his 32 per cent, well short of the 50 per cent threshold needed for an outright win. Exit polls for the runoff put participation higher, at about 27 to 29 per cent, and official figures showed turnout at 19.33 per cent by 4 p.m. local time, up from 15.95 per cent at the same hour in the first round.
The presidency in Bulgaria is a largely ceremonial role, but the contest has still been watched closely across Europe because of what the two candidates represent on foreign policy. Iotova favours dialogue with Russia and opposes military aid to Ukraine, while Gyurov was presented as the pro-Western candidate. She has been endorsed by Prime Minister Rumen Radev’s party, Progressive Bulgaria, which won an outright parliamentary majority in April’s parliamentary vote, taking 131 of the 240 seats.
That foreign-policy contrast gave the runoff a significance beyond the ceremonial powers of the office. Bulgaria is a member of both the European Union and NATO, and the vote took place against a background of security concern in the region, including a series of drone attacks on commercial vessels in the Black Sea. A president who argues for dialogue with Moscow would sit in a different relationship with Brussels and with NATO allies than a president aligned with the pro-Western opposition, even though day-to-day government is run by the prime minister and parliament.
The low turnout has itself become part of the story. A first-round turnout of 23 per cent was the lowest on record for a Bulgarian presidential election, and even the improved runoff figure of under 30 per cent, if confirmed, would mean that most eligible voters did not take part. Analysts have pointed to voter fatigue after repeated elections, disillusionment with the political class, and the sense that the presidency carries limited direct power as reasons why so many Bulgarians stayed away.
For Iotova personally, confirmation of the exit polls would mark a historic first. No woman has previously been elected president of Bulgaria, and her victory would make her the country’s seventh president and its first woman to win the office in a democratic vote. Her supporters presented the result as a vote for stability, with one member of her initiative committee, Petar Vitanov, saying after the runoff that Bulgaria would be more stable and more at ease following her election.
For Gyurov and his supporters, the runoff result, if it holds, will be a disappointment after a first round in which the gap was narrow enough to suggest a genuinely open contest. The wider margin in the exit polls suggests that undecided voters, and voters who had backed eliminated candidates in the first round, broke more heavily for the incumbent than for the challenger. His campaign had argued that Bulgaria needed a president firmly anchored in its Western alliances, and that argument did not, on the exit-poll evidence, carry the runoff.
What happens next is procedural but important. Partial official results were expected later on Sunday, and the final result on Monday will settle whether the exit-poll margin survives the count. If it does, Iotova will move from acting president to elected president with a mandate that, despite the low turnout, gives her a clear lead over her rival. If the count narrows unexpectedly, the focus will shift to which regions and which groups of voters produced the difference, and to whether any challenge to the result follows.
Either way, the runoff closes a presidential contest that began with 27 tickets, a record-low first-round turnout, and a second round fought over Bulgaria’s place between East and West. The exit polls point to a win for Iotova and to a first for Bulgarian democracy; the official count will now decide whether that first is confirmed.
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