Long-form data analysis of Bulgarian parliamentary elections — turnout, machine flash discrepancies, risk neighborhoods, polling accuracy.
Budget 2026 in focus: the record deficit, the critics, and a check against the numbers(2026-06-25) The first regular budget of the Radev cabinet arrives with a 5.7%-of-GDP deficit and an excessive-deficit procedure just months after euro adoption. We line up the verified figures from the 2026 Budget Law and the 2026–2028 medium-term forecast, gather the reactions of politicians and economists (sourced line by line), and run the claims themselves through our budget simulator: the deficit, the €2,300 social-security cap and the party-subsidy cut all check out; 'you can't consolidate while debt explodes' is arithmetically false; and the 'soft' revenue and the 'Videnov-era' comparison do not survive scrutiny.
Following the public money: a citizen's toolkit for procurement(2026-06-20) The expanded public-procurement module — set against АОП/ЦАИС ЕОП, SIGMA and the international tools (opentender.eu, DOZORRO, OCDS). An explainable Corruption Risk Index, money-flow diagrams, a politician scanner, a per-oblast choropleth and a red-flag feed — with worked examples of what you can actually find (single bidding, concentration, MP- and official-connected firms).
The BNB reserve after the euro: can it be spent?(2026-06-13) A recurring promise: with the euro, Bulgaria "frees up" 20–40 billion leva of reserves it can finally spend. We trace the claim to source — how big the BNB reserve actually is (≈€42bn), what happened to it on 1 January 2026 (a ≈€1.48bn transfer to the ECB in exchange for a non-redeemable claim — an accounting swap, not a release), and why EU law (Art 123 TFEU) and basic accounting mean neither the state nor anyone else gets cash to spend.
How the budget simulator works: data and model(2026-06-14) How /budget/simulator works: where the data comes from and how the model is built. Static and dynamic mode, how every lever is scored (VAT, income tax, corporate, dividends, the social-security cap, excise, spending), the behavioral elasticities and fiscal multipliers behind dynamic mode, the limitations and the validation against official costings.
Local councils and capital programmes — what we ingest and what's missing(2026-06-02) An audit of all 16 municipalities with council-votes data and 26 with capital-programme data on electionsbg.com. Data tables, gaps grouped by issue (publication policy, Cloudflare/TSPD bot guards, scanned PDFs, stale CMSes), and the eight oblast capitals where readers can ask their councils to publish what their bigger peers already do.
Twenty years of Bulgarian cabinets — what the numbers actually show(2026-05-24) Analysis of all 18 cabinets since 2005 through their macro footprints — GDP, inflation, unemployment, debt and EU funds. What worked and what didn't for each mandate, who left the bill for the next, and why the last 4 years are a paradox: the most unstable politics on top of the strongest economy since EU accession.
A budget scorecard for Bulgaria — five risks, five opportunities(2026-05-19) A structured read of Bulgaria's state budget, pinned to specific tiles on the /budget dashboard. Analysis of the new proposal to raise the maximum insurable income to €2,300, plan-versus-actual ministry deviations, the social-functions concentration of spending, and the post-euro fiscal headroom.
A governance scorecard for Bulgaria — seven risks, six opportunities(2026-05-18) A structured read of Bulgarian governance, pinned to specific tiles on the /governance dashboard. What the data says about cabinet stability, institutional trust, WGI scores, debt and budget — and where on the dashboard to check live values.
Election risk screening — new tools for the 19.04.2026 vote(2026-05-13) Composite index (47/100, High risk) from five process-integrity signals, plus four context signals (Benford, neighborhood swing, electoral volatility, polling error). Per-section risk screening (10 Critical out of 12,705) and per-party Benford 2BL. Aligned with the international electoral-integrity frameworks.
Machine-only voting: who wins and who loses(2026-07-21) An interactive what-if on Bulgaria's own election data. Since 2021 every section records machine and paper votes separately — the same electorate split only by voting medium, which makes the split a natural experiment. We remove the paper ballot in every 'large' section (above a chosen threshold), recast its paper-voters onto that section's machine distribution, and watch national vote share and parliamentary seats recompute live. Sliders control the threshold (100/200/300/500 voters) and a turnout drop-off; the pattern is consistent — ГЕРБ and ДПС lose, ПП-ДБ gains.
Budget 2026: adopted in month seven — what the numbers show(2026-07-25) Parliament passed the 2026 budget on 24 July, 125 to 84, with five months left in the year. We test the contested claims against our own data: month-by-month cash execution, the text of every budget law since 2018, and the recorded votes. The 5.7% deficit is partly a choice — but about a third of what the official difference suggests, because the Fiscal Council never accepted that the earlier versions genuinely sat below 3%. And the calendar makes the ceiling hard to reach.