On December 11, 2025, Bulgaria’s minority government, led by Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov, collapsed due to mass protests sparked by the proposed 2026 budget which included a two-percentage-point increase in pension insurance contributions and much larger rise in the dividend tax from 5% to 10%. These protests, the largest since the 1990s, saw over 150,000 people in more than 20 cities demonstrating against years of economic hardship, including significant inflation and energy cost increases. The demonstrators protested against the planned budget for the coming year, as well as against the bourgeois “mafia”, and demanded the resignation of the widely hated government. Although the government resigned following these protests, this change is merely replacing and reshuffling the composition of which the bourgeois “mafia” clique’s political operators will control the official levers of state power to ensure a smooth entry of Bulgaria into the Eurozone and deepening ties to the US/EU imperialist bloc.

A Quick Sketch of the History of Class Struggle In Bulgaria

The current economic crisis is deeply rooted in a long history of industrial decline, class struggle and the transition from a state capitalist model to a market economy, which was ensured to happen by former secret police and criminal bourgeois elites. These more recent events and most recent strikes and protests are part of a long line of class struggle in Bulgaria, the history of which was initially tightly intertwined with the history of the genuine Bulgarian communists of the early 20th century.

The Narrow Socialists spearheaded the 1904 Pernik miners’ strike, where workers fought a month-long battle against 12-hour shifts and harsh discipline, successfully securing higher wages and the right to form the General Workers’ Trade Union despite military intervention. The Narrows were involved in organizing the 1893 print workers’ strike and the 1899 Sliven textile walkouts, eventually leading the massive 1906 railway strike that paralyzed grain exports for 43 days. The 1919 national general strike saw the Bulgarian Communist Party coordinate over 40,000 workers in a month-long blockade of the rail, mail, and telegraph systems that eventually required the government to declare martial law and deploy the military to crush the movement.

The Narrows were largely liquidated in the 20s and “popular front” “communism” and Stalinism took over, closely following what was happening world wide in the Comintern but this did not stop workers from fighting for their own survival, although now without anything resembling a class party. The 1936 Great Tobacco Strike mobilized 30,000 workers who, supported by underground logistical networks and secret presses of the now degraded communist party, successfully paralyzed the nation’s primary export industry to demand better pay and labor conditions despite intense state surveillance. In May 1953, thousands of women workers at the Ivan Karadjov warehouse in Plovdiv seized the facility to demand job security and better conditions, forcing a retreat of the initial militia response with stones until the state opened fire, killing at least three strikers. In the 1980s, workers in Ruse initiated "silent strikes" by reporting to factories while refusing to operate machinery to protest chronic chlorine poisoning from a Romanian chemical plant across the Danube, a movement that evolved into the first mass street demonstrations in stalinist Bulgaria where thousands, including mothers with strollers, wore gas masks to demand environmental safety and government accountability.

When the eastern bloc finally collapsed under the pressure of its own overproduction crisis in 1989, a new era began. After the 1989 coup, the secret police (DS) elite rebranded as reformers to maintain class dominance, using a government decree to privatize state assets into the hands of a new "mafia" class of former agents and athletes. They formed groups like Multigroup to drain industrial giants like the Neftochim refinery and Balkan Airlines by selling at a massive discount and also overinflating the input costs, thus transferring the government’s capital into their own private capital. Alongside this mafia privatization scheme, in 1991 an agreement on Maintaining Social Peace was signed, which integrated the dissident Podkrepa and the state-controlled KNSB unions into the government apparatus as regime unions to preserve bourgeois order.

Despite this, during the 1990 "Hungry Winter", miners in Maritsa Iztok, who were unionized under the regime unions, launched wildcat strikes in an attempt to gain back wages in the face of hyperinflation and empty shelves. Because their strike could have successfully shut down the national energy grid, which was heavily dependent on coal and had no stockpiles as an alternative, combined with massive street protests, the Lukanov government was forced to resign. By 1997, a second crisis saw even higher, 2,000% inflation which led to the collapse of any savings the shrinking middle-classes had at that point. These conditions led transport workers at the Port of Varna to lead spontaneous blockades and storm parliament to topple the Videnov regime. This was the final step towards full privatization that the bourgeois mafia had paved the way for. This instability allowed the IMF to enforce structural adjustment programs that privatized 50% of national property by 1999 and handed 98% of the banking sector to foreign entities like UniCredit, who extracted additional surplus value through high-interest retail loans.

The transition to the EU in 2007 further entrenched these conditions by creating a pool of cheap labor for Western capital through a 10% flat tax and legal restrictions on guest worker movement and wages. Bulgarians were emigrating in mass but could not get the same pay as other EU workers did. In 2007, 110,000 educators engaged in a six-week strike against monthly wages of $320, demanding a 100% pay hike and increased GDP spending on education. While they secured a 46% increase, many criticized the regime unions for settling with what was effectively a real wage decrease. Meanwhile, in the Bulgarian countryside, "grain barons" used legal loopholes to seize 80% of arable land and capture EU subsidies, further squeezing the rural working class and also small farmers.

By 2017, workers from Piccadilly supermarkets and Max Telecom had started bypassing official unions to organize autonomous blockades against wage theft, successfully forcing parliament to reform the Labor Code. Despite the rise of "reformist" parties like We Continue the Change (PP) in 2021, the underlying economic system remains unchanged, as new fangled reformists (new mafia bourgeois oligarchs) like Delyan Peevski maintain control over the courts and security agencies while regime unions continue to funnel worker anger into safe, legal avenues.

Another effect of the capitalist crisis of the 90’s was a forced exodus of workers to wealthier nations due to economic hardship. This emigration reduced the reserve army of labor in Bulgaria, while guaranteeing low wage labor becoming more available in Western nations, which greatly benefited global and Bulgarian capital by providing the west with cheap labor and maintaining social peace and lowering worker discontent in Bulgaria. By late 2025, this population decline, resulting from emigration and low birth rates due to unfavorable material conditions for workers to raise families, has led to labor shortages across all industries in Bulgaria, draining both the "brain" and "muscle" of its workforce on multiple occasions.

As can be seen in Table 1, despite positive pressure on wages that a small population and thus reserve army of labor creates, the real wages of the bottom 75% of the country still haven’t quite recovered since the great economic crisis of the 90s. The fact that the bourgeois and the remaining middle classes are doing comparatively much better has escalated worker’s discontent

Real wages/income distribution relative to total population over time
Year	Popu- lation	Bottom 75%	Middle 15%	Top 10%
1989	8.8	1,399	2,249	3,292
1996	8.3	211	370	759
2003	7.8	443	924	1,971
2015	7.2	736	1,917	4,370
2023	6.4	1,133	2,872	8,102
2024	6.4	1,260	3,193	9,008

Note: Absolute wage/income is fixed to 2023 BGN and is estimated and calculated based on data on averages and distributions of real wages from “Real Wage Base (CSI)” and “World Inequality Database (WID) - Bulgaria”. The relation to wages is much closer at the bottom and middle than at the top 10%, where we see income from capital included, to the extent it’s reported.

Note: Data on population from National Population Data (NSI)

As of 2023, Bulgaria is still recognized as the poorest nation in the EU based on GDP per capita. This is reflected in the poverty rate, with approximately 22% of Bulgarian citizens living below the poverty line, earning €257 or less per month. In 2024, 30.3% of the population was at risk of social exclusion, the highest percentage in the EU, which includes those facing income poverty, severe material deprivation, or low employment rates. While economic growth between 2015 and 2020 improved living standards compared to the rough transition years of the 1990s and reduced the worst forms of poverty to 4.5%, income inequality kept increasing, and the at-risk-of-poverty rate reached 22.1% in 2020. In Q2 2025, the nationwide house price index in Bulgaria increased by 15.51%.

Events Since 2020 That Led to the Current Strike and Protest Wave

While much smaller in comparison to the 1990s hyperinflation, the current inflationary surge stemmed from energy dependency and global supply shocks, beginning with a natural gas price increase in 2021. After Russia’s Gazprom ceased direct gas exports in April 2022, Bulgaria was compelled to procure gas through intermediaries at inflated prices. This, along with the EU’s 2023 oil embargo, led to household gas prices rising by 144% and district heating by 40%. Simultaneously, a capitalist housing bubble emerged as local elites invested savings in real estate to avoid currency devaluation, causing property prices in cities like Sofia and Varna to nearly double by late 2025. While the international and local bourgeoisie are getting even richer, workers face a 15.3% peak in annual inflation by late 2022 and while inflation slowed a bit by late 2025, the proletariat still experienced a decline in real purchasing power due to food cost surges of 24.9% and massive utility hikes, leading to workers once again being unable to pay their heating bills. In January 2025, the national minimum wage was raised to BGN 1,077, but 400,000 people still struggle to survive on this amount.

In the background of all this economic turmoil and struggle between the different classes in Bulgaria the bourgeois government has been dissolved and regrouped seven times now in the last 4 years, which has also meant the organizing of seven costly elections in the same time.

On January 16, 2025, a minority coalition of GERB, BSP, and ITN took power with shadow support from the much hated by the students and workers Delyan Peevski. By the time they raised the proposal for the very unpopular budget, massive protests were already taking over the streets. At the same time refinery workers at Lukoil Neftohim in Burgas, organized under the regime union Podkrepa, threatened a total shutdown to demand a 30% wage increase and legal protections against asset stripping as the state moved toward nationalization. While the Zhelyazkov government granted a 24 month job guarantee and a bonus, they rejected the pay hike and domestic price caps, leaving workers to face inflation with nothing but a job guarantee while the refinery owners hid $2.4 billion in profits abroad. Simultaneously, railway and energy workers bypassed official leadership to form independent base union cells, utilizing work to rule tactics and safety reporting to paralyze freight and coal deliveries. These autonomous cells successfully organized Trakia Highway blockades and sustained their struggle through decentralized donations after the state froze their bank accounts to stop their resistance against infrastructure privatization.

At the same time, the bourgeois “grain barons” we mentioned earlier, under cartel National Grain Producers Association, launched an employer strike using industrial machinery for 85 blockades to secure €76 million in EU aid for the owning class of grain barons. They negotiated with the regime unions for pay increases to machine operator workers in the grain production industry and paid stipends for unorganized workers to man the blockades and strike for the employers, in order to extract concessions and protections for their own dying industry in the face of very cheap Ukrainian grain being flooded in by western and Ukrainian capital. While these wealthy landholders protected their 10% flat tax and subsidies, the machine workers got a 20% wage increase against a 39.5% cumulative inflation rate.

In 2026, Bulgaria’s bourgeois remains entrenched despite rotating cabinets, deepening the nation’s interdependence with the US/EU imperialist bloc. While arms manufacturers reap record profits from the Ukrainian conflict, the working class remains fragmented and leaderless and misled by regime unions, to the low extent to which it is even organized.

What Needs to be Done

Though the instinct for independent unionism and militant struggle persists, these spontaneous strikes and street protests lack a revolutionary party to forge them into a conscious political force. A real living revolutionary working class is one that is organized under class-unions that reject electoral battles to promote an indefinite general strike without minimum services and that is tightly linked to its party, whose message it transmits to the class through its words and deeds. Bulgarian workers can get inspiration from their own local history and from the history of the international working class as a whole and while there is a long road ahead, we encourage all Bulgarians who wish to fight for communism to get in touch with us and organize!

For the Class Union! For The Indefinite Strike! Against all Wars that Pit Worker Against Worker! For Communism!