If he becomes a "corrective" or "opposition" to the government elected by the parliament, this automatically deprives him of his main constitutional function
The President under the Bulgarian constitutional model is not a protocol master of ceremonies, but he is not the holder of executive power
The President is not and should not be a "corrective" to the government, as ignorant, deceptive and harmful voices for Bulgaria have been heard here and there in recent years. This is because the constitutional mandate is for the president to be a catalyst for dialogue and agreement in order to maintain the stability of the political system, overcome inter-institutional conflicts and consolidate the nation around major national priorities.
If he becomes a “corrective“ or an “opposition“ to the government elected by parliament, this automatically deprives him of his main constitutional function in relations with the three branches of government - the function of political arbitration. Because an arbitrator, whether in the public or private sphere, automatically loses his status as an arbitrator when he takes sides, since he loses the trust of the party with which he is “at war“. This applies even more strongly to higher constitutional politics.
In this sense, in the conditions of parliamentary government, the president is assigned the role of a “neutral authority“ - a concept of state law, developed by Benjamin Constant and having received various modifications in modern constitutional systems with one goal - to prevent the overconcentration of power and ensure balance and equilibrium between the various centers of power. When a president leaves the status of a neutral authority and loses the capacity to carry out political arbitration, then the state enters a cycle of political crises and confrontations, which ultimately do not bring anything good to the citizens.
The president under the Bulgarian constitutional model is not a protocol master of ceremonies, but he is not the holder of executive power, and even less should he leave his high constitutional status and condescend to the arena of party struggles, because his political imperative is the national interest and the consolidation of the nation around the values proclaimed in the Constitution, and not in party statutes or subjective political views. In order to fulfill this role, the head of state must have the capacity and will to engage in dialogue with all those to whom some of the Bulgarian citizens have entrusted their political representation.
I have noted more than once over the years that in this regard, the full implementation of one of the most important functions that the Constitution assigns to the president - the so-called "communication power" is of key importance. From the constitutional pedestal of the "unity of the nation" the head of state has the explicitly regulated right to address the nation and the parliament. This is not about the banal New Year's addresses inherited from the totalitarian regime (it is high time they were abolished!), after which they play the "Danube Dance" on television.
The president's communication power can be exercised effectively only through meaningful political statements aimed at forming strategic directions of national policy, the geopolitical affiliation of Bulgaria and mobilizing support for them from public opinion. Statements that do not draw party lines, but point to constructive solutions, shared goals and common horizons for the state and the nation. The president must be a generator and even a catalyst for broad political dialogue and national consensus, and be an indefatigable advocate for dialogue with everyone in the name of common national goals. He has no right to demonstrate personal biases, sympathies and antipathies towards the party elites, because he is constitutionally obliged to embody the unity of the nation, which consists of all citizens, regardless of which politician they sympathize with or which party they vote for or do not vote for.
The strong democratic legitimation of the direct vote for president creates a dynamic balance of political majorities whenever there is a change in public sentiment between two elections for the National Assembly. And this has been manifested in political practice since 1991 - whenever the party majority begins to sharply lose confidence, a candidate from another political trend wins the presidential elections. The same logic is embodied in Bulgarian conditions in the vice-presidential post.
This is the institutional mechanism that stimulates the construction of broader coalition majorities for the election of a president - party or class-professional. We saw how this served for party consolidation in the election of Dr. Zhelev, when the vice president was from the Bulgarian Socialist Party, under Petar Stoyanov, whose runner-up was from the agricultural movement, for expanding the social base of a given candidacy to class-professional circles - the intelligentsia (Blaga Dimitrova), the military (Angel Marin), the legal community (Margarita Popova), etc.
Dialogue, supra-partisanship, constructiveness, agreement, balance and equilibrium - these are the key concepts that decipher the constitutional role of a president useful to the nation. Conversely, the transformation of the presidential post into a quasi-party leadership, which leads its cohort of clientelistic and political interests, leads to a deep division of the nation and permanently destabilizes the state. In recent years, the presidential institution has played precisely such a malicious role, which has thrown the state into the abyss of a political “Africanization“ - a concept that I introduced years ago into the Bulgarian academic discourse and public environment in order to illustrate the reduction of the political process to a clan war for control over power and resources, without regard to the common good. And it is precisely this - the common good - that is the civilizational mark of successful and modern societies.
Not the ruthless confrontation, not the political revanchism and not the endless party-oligarchic vendettas, managerial arbitrariness, clientelism and corruption. Does Bulgarian society have the capacity to break out of the vicious circle into which it has been drawn in recent years? Over time, I am becoming more and more skeptical. However, I am taking the opportunity in the period between the two rounds of the presidential elections in 2026 to once again issue a warning from the point of view of national interests, which in their most concentrated form are expressed in Bulgaria being a dignified and democratic state, part of the Free World.
The social experience of modern constitutional civilization has shown and proven beyond doubt that in polarized societies in which there are no sustainable democratic traditions and a political culture based on personal freedom, the constitutional model of government should be polycentric, contain guarantees against excessive concentration of power and have reliable mechanisms for coordination through the deliberation of diverse social interests. At the constitutional level, only the parliamentary model of government is such, which is not by chance perceived as the main one for Europe. To those who will hasten to point the finger at France with its “semi-presidential“ (according to Duverger), and in fact - semi-parliamentary government, it must be said again that this is due to the national specificity of France, in which traditionally Bonapartist and democratic tendencies collide, but it is the exception that only confirms the rule that Europe perceives the parliamentary form of government as the most solid guarantee of democracy.
And this is so because historical experience shows that presidential government and presidentialism as its more extreme form, in which everything is in the hands of the “strong leader“, who is not subject to parliamentary control, always lead to authoritarianism. This constitutional axiom has a single and brilliant exception - the presidential republic in the USA. But this exception is again due to national specifics and factors that are collectively lacking in Europe and even more so in Bulgaria (not to mention other regions): a federal state structure that limits the sole power of the federal president, an independent court, a rooted and vibrant civil society, an uninterrupted democratic tradition for a quarter of a millennium.
Given all this, the warning is: any attempt in Bulgaria to create constitutional conditions for a presidential regime will quickly degenerate into an attempt on democracy and civil liberties. Nothing more and nothing less!