New Bulgarian interim Prime Minister Andrey Gyurov. Source: bnb.bg

President Iliyana Yotova appointed financier Andrey Gyurov from the reformist party We Continue the Change as interim Prime Minister on Wednesday, following the collapse of the previous government after anti-establishment protests. 

Appointing Gyurov has been the first major move by Yotova, who stepped into office after serving as vice-president to Rumen Radev – who resigned on January 19, several months before the end of his mandate.

By selecting Gyurov, Yotova dodged claims that she would continue Radev’s Eurosceptic policy. Yotova said the day before the appointment that “the interim Prime Minister has to deal with many challenges facing the country, most importantly holding fair elections”.

The interim cabinet that Gyurov will select will hold power until general elections due on April 14. The polls are being held because the coalition led by the centre-right GERB party resigned under pressure from the biggest protests in the country in decades.

The fall of the government sent Bulgaria back into its prolonged election spiral: the April vote will be the eighth general election in five years.

Yotova did not address criticisms about why the process of appointing an interim premier took more than two months. Last Friday, GERB leader Boyko Borissov castigated the delay as “meaningless procrastination”.

Gyurov, who has not commented publicly yet on his nomination, was born in 1975 in Blagoevgrad. He has been a deputy governor of the Bulgarian National Bank since 2023. In the late 1990s he lived in the United States and graduated in economics from Truman State University in Missouri, after which he taught finance at Vienna University.  

He returned to Bulgaria in 2008, worked as a teacher, then became one of the co-founders of the party Yes, Bulgaria, which is currently part of the Democratic Bulgaria alliance.

In 2021, he switched to We Continue the Change as the reformist party gained traction and won a snap election held the same year. 

Bulgaria’s eight interim cabinets – mirroring Bulgaria’s eight general elections since 2021 – gained a questionable reputation. 

They were repeatedly used by President Radev to oppose parliament, and to delay or even reverse reforms. However, ministers from the interim cabinet of 2021 largely created the main pro-EU opposition party, We Continue the Change.

In a separate development on Wednesday, parliament started hearings with Interior Ministry representatives about six mysterious deaths in two shooting incidents in Bulgaria’s mountainous north-west – a case dubbed by media as “the Bulgarian Twin Peaks”.

The deaths are being investigated by the police as a murder and a suicide, but speculation has become widespread as many details remain vague.