The starting point for this investigation is a question that contains a false assumption: it asks who won the most recent Bulgarian presidential election and treats Andrey Gyurov as a candidate for the presidency. To answer it, the offices and elections involved must first be separated, because Bulgaria's political system draws a sharp line between them.

Bulgaria elects its head of state, the President, directly for a five-year term under the Constitution. ² It separately elects a 240-seat National Assembly, and the government — headed by a Prime Minister — is formed from that parliament. These are two different offices, filled by two different kinds of election. Conflating them is the single most common way the record about Bulgaria in this period gets misread.

The recent years have been turbulent. Bulgaria held repeated early parliamentary elections after 2021, and by June 2024 the country was on its sixth such contest since that year. ² Against that backdrop of frequent parliamentary voting, it is easy to assume a presidential race happened too. The evidence says it did not.

Anyone searching for a recent Bulgarian presidential result keeps arriving at the same date: November 2021. Four independent sources — the country's own Central Election Commission, the IFES Election Guide, the Robert Schuman Foundation, and Wikipedia — all place the most recent completed presidential election in that month, with three of them specifying the second-round date of 21 November 2021. ⁴ On the winning percentage, two independent sources report an identical figure to two decimals — 66.72% — a rare exact agreement that leaves little room for doubt about the headline result. ³

The more important finding for this question is a negative one. No presidential election was held in Bulgaria in 2024. The Central Election Commission's official archive lists none, and the IFES database independently confirms that only National Assembly elections took place that year, in June and October. ³ The elections that did occur in 2024 were parliamentary and European Parliament contests, not presidential ones. ⁴ The June 2024 vote was an early parliamentary election, the sixth since 2021, and the October 2024 vote was a National Assembly election won by the GERB–SDS coalition with 25.52%. ³ These four origins — the official commission, an international monitoring mission, a global elections database, and an encyclopedia entry — converge without dissent.

Looking forward, the sources point to 2026 for the next presidential vote. The Central Election Commission and Wikipedia both list 2026 as the next presidential election year, and IFES gives a tentative date of 30 November 2026 while flagging it as not yet confirmed. ³ The timing is internally consistent: a five-year term running from November 2021 lands the next election in 2026. ² The arithmetic holds without strain.

Open: The exact date of the 2026 presidential election rests on a single source that labels it unconfirmed [C-015].

If the record shows a clear presidential winner, it is the ticket of Rumen Radev and Iliana Iotova, but the year matters. Radev, paired with Iliana Iotova as vice-president, won the November 2021 presidential election with 66.72% in the second round. ³ Both figures reporting that result are independent of one another, and they match exactly. ³ That is the office and the election the central question is really about — and its winner has been the same person since 2017.

Where the record gets misread is the April 2026 election, which Radev's party also won. In the 19 April 2026 vote, his Progressive Bulgaria took roughly 44% and an absolute majority of the 240-seat chamber. Three sources reporting at different counting stages agree: Wikipedia records 43.91% and 131 seats, Deutsche Welle reported 44.7% with 96% of ballots counted and projected 130 to 132 seats, and the LSE European Politics blog put the result at over 44% and 130 seats. ³ The small spread in the vote share is what one expects between a partial and a final count, and the seat figures all cluster around 131 — comfortably above the 120 needed for a majority in a 240-seat parliament.

But this was a parliamentary election, not a presidential one, and the distinction changes the answer entirely. The office Radev won in April 2026 was Prime Minister, not President. He had served as president for nine years — from 2017 to 2026 — before resigning in January 2026 to run for parliament. ³ Deutsche Welle and the LSE blog both describe the same career arc, and their timelines agree that his presidency ran until early 2026. ² According to Wikipedia, Vice President Iliana Iotova stepped up to serve as President following Radev's resignation. ¹ In other words, the man who won the most recent presidential election and the man who won the most recent parliamentary election are the same person — but they are two different victories, in two different offices, five years apart.

Open: Iotova's assumption of the presidency after Radev's resignation is documented by a single source [C-011].

The inconvenient part of the central question — Gyurov's vote share and placement in the presidential race — cannot be answered, because the race it describes did not involve him. No source in the record places Andrey Gyurov on any presidential ballot. What the sources show instead is a career in central banking and party politics. Bulgarian civil society organisations identify him as a vice-chairman or deputy governor of the Bulgarian National Bank and a prominent figure in the We Continue the Change (PP) party. ¹ The same organisations describe him explicitly as a central banker and party official, not a presidential candidate. ¹

His one documented move into high office was an appointment, not an election. In February 2026 Gyurov was named to lead an interim, or caretaker, government — a temporary administration that runs the country between governments. The Robert Schuman Foundation dates this to 12 February 2026, while Wikipedia gives 18 February 2026; the small discrepancy does not affect the substance, on which both agree: he became caretaker Prime Minister, an office he was appointed to, not voted into. ² This is a categorically different thing from winning a direct presidential election.

His absence from the electoral rolls is corroborated. Wikipedia's account of the October 2024 parliamentary contest lists no candidate or leader named Andrey Gyurov among the field. ¹ His public profile in this period was shaped instead by a personnel dispute: he was removed from the National Bank in July 2024 over an alleged incompatibility, a decision the Sofia City Administrative Court later overturned in December 2024. ¹ That is a story about central-bank governance, not a presidential campaign. The vote share the question asks for simply has no referent.

Open: Gyurov's removal-and-reinstatement timeline at the National Bank rests on a single civil-society source [C-023].

Because no presidential election was held in the relevant window, there is no presidential result to certify or contest. The certification and legal-challenge activity in the record attaches entirely to parliamentary elections — a point that itself confirms which offices were actually being filled.

For the June 2024 parliamentary election, the process ran cleanly on the record available. OSCE/ODIHR reports that the Central Election Commission announced final results on 13 June 2024, and that no challenge was filed with the Constitutional Court by the 20 June deadline. ¹ The October 2024 parliamentary election was a different matter. In March 2025 the Constitutional Court ruled, after a recount, that 16 of the 240 MPs had been elected illegally. ² The Business Standard reports that the October 2024 result was partially overturned after the court reviewed evidence of vote-tampering, and that more than 1,000 election violations were reported with over 180 people detained ahead of the 2026 vote, though that violations figure rests on that outlet alone. ¹

Crucially, the court's jurisdiction and the cases it actually heard do not point at a presidential contest. The Venice Commission notes that under Article 145 of the Constitution the Constitutional Court rules on disputes over the legitimacy of the President's election — but it also records that the 2024 cases before the court all concerned the 27 October 2024 parliamentary snap elections, not any presidential election. ¹ The machinery exists for presidential disputes; in this period it was never invoked, because there was no presidential election to dispute.

Open: Whether the 2026 parliamentary result has itself been certified or challenged is not addressed by any source.

The analyst's framework offers several explanations for the events of 2024–2026, and — unusually — they are not really rivals. They stack into a single coherent account, each supported and none contradicted by the record. The task here is less to referee a dispute than to show why the alternative reading behind the original question fails.

One explanation holds that no presidential election was held in 2024 and that the next is due in 2026. It is supported across the board: the official commission, OSCE, IFES and Wikipedia all agree no presidential vote occurred that year, and the five-year term from 2021 places the next one in 2026. ⁴ A companion reading holds that Radev won the 2021 presidential election and served until his resignation in January 2026. ⁴ A third holds that Gyurov never ran for president at all, serving instead as a central banker and then caretaker Prime Minister, and never appearing on a candidate list. ⁴ A fourth holds that the April 2026 election Radev's party won was parliamentary, making him Prime Minister rather than President. ³ Each of these rests on multiple independent origins that converge, and none carries any contradicting claim.

The reading implied by the original question — that a presidential election recently took place and that Gyurov was a contender who might become president — has no support in the record and several direct contradictions. There is no presidential ballot, no presidential candidate named Gyurov, and no presidential vote count anywhere in the sources. ⁴ The strongest objection to the mainstream account is a different one: that the sources describing 2026 events might be unreliable, since some carry future-dated assertions. But even setting every 2026-dated claim aside, the core conclusion survives untouched — the pre-2026 official record from the commission, OSCE and IFES already establishes that no presidential election happened in 2024 and that Gyurov was a central banker, not a candidate. ⁴ The single discriminating test the analyst identifies is a documentary one: an official commission list of presidential candidates for any election in this window would settle the matter definitively, and no such list places Gyurov on it.

The evidence does not merely lean toward an answer; it forecloses the alternative. Bulgaria held its most recent presidential election in November 2021, and the ticket of Rumen Radev and Iliana Iotova won it with 66.72%. ³ No presidential election has been held since, and the record from the country's own election authority is explicit that 2024 saw only parliamentary contests. ⁴ The next presidential election is scheduled for 2026. ² These are confirmed findings, backed by convergent independent sourcing.

On the specific premise of the original question, the conclusion is equally firm and negative. Andrey Gyurov's vote share and placement in a presidential election cannot be reported because he was never a presidential candidate; every source that describes his role identifies him as a central banker and party figure who was appointed — not elected — caretaker Prime Minister in February 2026. ³ There is no scenario in the evidence in which Gyurov 'becomes the next president.'

One point deserves a plain-language caveat about what remains genuinely open. Whether Gyurov could contest and win a future presidential election in 2026 is not something the record addresses — it is a question about the future, and speculating on it would go beyond the evidence. What can be said with confidence is about the past and present: as of the record's most recent dates, the office of President passed from Radev to Vice President Iotova on his resignation, Radev moved to lead the government as Prime Minister after the April 2026 parliamentary win, and Gyurov held only a temporary appointed post. ³ The question's framing collapsed a parliamentary win, a caretaker appointment, and a presidency into one imagined event. Pulled apart, each piece has a clear and separately sourced answer — and none of them makes Gyurov Bulgaria's next president.