Will Iliana Iotova remain president of Bulgaria?
Bulgaria votes for president on October 25. We explain which candidate is the clear favorite and how our bet targets a 37% return.
On October 25, Bulgaria elects a president. Currently, the woman most likely to win is Iliana Iotova, who already holds the position, and nobody has ever voted for her to become president.
Rumen Radev, the previous president, held the position for nine years. In January, he resigned to start a political party, and under Bulgarian rules, the vice president takes over when that happens. That vice president was Iliana Iotova.
Radev's new party then won the parliamentary election in April outright, taking 43.91% of the vote and 131 of the 240 seats. He was sworn in as prime minister in May, and the person who formally handed him that job was Iotova.
She now wants the presidency in her own name, and Radev is backing her. Polymarket's market on the election predicts a 73% probability that she gets it.
Her opponent also owes her a job. Back in February, she appointed Andrey Gyurov, a deputy governor of Bulgaria's central bank, as caretaker prime minister, and his government ran the April election that produced Radev's majority. Bulgaria's two liberal parties agreed to put him up for president yesterday afternoon.
However, he starts a long way back. Gallup's August survey found 48.4% of Bulgarians approve of Iotova and 29.2% do not, the best rating of anybody in the country's public life, and Radev's party has more seats than everybody else combined. Compared to all of that, Gyurov's two parties took just 12.42% between them in April.
October 25 will probably not settle it, though. To win in one round, a candidate needs more than half the votes cast, and more than half of all registered voters have to show up. Turnout in the first round of the last presidential election was 40%, which made winning outright arithmetically impossible before a single ballot was counted. The top two candidates then go again a week later.
Gyurov would have to find another 35 points that Sunday, and the only places to find them are Boyko Borissov's center-right party, which his own movement was founded to oppose, and a nationalist pro-Russian party that will not vote for a liberal central banker.
Which is why we are betting on Iotova to keep her position, so that we can capture a 37% return in a couple of months.
This page does not constitute investing advice. Prediction markets and/or gambling may result in loss of funds. You are advised to conduct your own due diligence before taking any action.
