In April 2026, what remained of the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s electorate defected to former president Rumen Radev’s new party, Progressive Bulgaria, ejecting the Socialists from parliament for the first time in living memory. Months earlier the party had chosen Krum Zarkov — a lawyer and former justice minister born in 1982 — on a platform of returning to socialist roots. At the party’s 135th anniversary at Buzludzha Peak, he talked to Jacobin’s Loren Balhorn and Madlen Nikolova about the double-speak that hollowed out Eastern European social democracy, and why he thinks the pitch is finally landing.

The history behind the party:

  • 1891: some twenty activists found the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers’ Party at a clandestine mountain rendezvous — the meeting the anniversary commemorates.
  • 1923: the newly formed Bulgarian Communist Party launches a failed uprising after the Russian Revolution.
  • World War II: a decisive role in the antifascist partisan resistance, then power with Soviet backing from 1944.
  • 1944–1990: Soviet-style planning industrializes an overwhelmingly rural peasant country in a matter of years, eliminates illiteracy, houses millions cheaply, and builds infrastructure Bulgarians still use — alongside nationalist policies that grew increasingly hostile to the Turkish minority.
  • 1989–90: the BCP renames itself the BSP and wins the first democratic elections — the only former Eastern Bloc ruling party to survive thirty-five years after the fall.

The decline, in Zarkov’s account, was a contradiction the voters eventually punished. Socialists inherited a legacy but developed a “doublespeak”: nostalgic for socialism inside the party, rejecting almost everything associated with it outside. The West, he says, “tasked the party with implementing the neoliberal shock doctrine — privatizing, creating markets, and opening the economy to foreign investment. The complete opposite of socialism.” The BSP led Bulgaria into the EU, embraced austerity, then turned nationalist under Korneliya Ninova. Eight parliamentary elections between 2020 and 2026 later, the membership collapsed from 27 percent to 7 to 3.

His diagnosis of where power actually sits:

  • Bulgaria’s gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is wider than in the United States — and with a population of 5.5 million, the elite are not abstract.
  • The state and the mafia used to be two entities; “now they’ve made it official” — they build their own parties and buy elections vote by vote, which makes social dialogue in single-employer regions close to impossible.
  • The tax code is the lever: a 10 percent flat income tax, a 10 percent corporate rate, 5 percent capital gains, and 20 percent VAT. Not a flat tax, he says, “it’s brutally regressive.”
  • On the climate question he reaches for the classic Marxist framing: who pays — the polluters or those who suffer from pollution? Shuttering coal plants immediately would set off a social bomb, and “retrain miners as gardeners” proposals are unserious.

On organization, Zarkov concedes his party is a one-party-state structure in a country with roughly a hundred thousand supporters rather than a million members, where more members meant more delegates meant more influence — an incentive for padded lists. He wants networked, less hierarchical organizing, will put statute changes to members directly this fall rather than first to the national council, and says that if it fails, he leaves. Anti-corruption comes first, both morally and tactically, because “socialism needs rules, and rules require the rule of law.”

The interview’s sharpest turn is international. Bulgaria’s membership in NATO and the EU, he argues, is itself a limiting condition — the country “just follows the will of the stronger states” on Gaza and Iran, and the fear generated by those wars is what is now pushing Bulgarians to expect their government to challenge official positions rather than echo them. A socialist party with no seats in parliament, betting that a public unwilling to lose its political freedom will eventually notice it is losing economic freedom too.