Party Analysis: 'There Is Such a People' / ITN (Bulgaria)
Protest Politics on the EU's Eastern Frontier
There Is Such a People (ITN) is neither Bulgaria’s first protest party nor its most radical - but it is among the clearest expressions of the country’s chronic anti-establishment cycle. Founded in 2020 by television entertainer Slavi Trifonov, ITN promised to break the grip of oligarchic politics, cleanse the judiciary, and restore popular sovereignty in a system widely viewed as captured by entrenched elites. It blended populist rhetoric with ideological ambiguity: socially conservative but institutionally reformist, Eurosceptical in tone yet formally pro-EU, hostile to the political class but reliant on it for governing.
Electorally, ITN’s trajectory has been volatile. After spectacular breakthroughs in 2021, the party collapsed below the parliamentary threshold in 2022, only to recover modestly in 2024. In the October 2024 election - the seventh parliamentary contest in under four years - it secured 5.9 per cent of the vote and 16 seats in Bulgaria’s 240-member National Assembly. By late 2025, it was polling at around 5 per cent: no longer a disruptive insurgent, but not yet irrelevant. Its participation in a fragile minority government in 2025, followed by resignation amid renewed anti-corruption protests, encapsulates both its ambition and its limits.
Why ITN Exists
ITN emerged from a specific political moment: the mass protests of 2020-21 that targeted the long-dominant centre-right GERB party and its leader Boyko Borisov. These demonstrations - sparked by corruption scandals, perceived judicial capture, and the visible fusion of business and politics - exposed deep public distrust in Bulgaria’s post-communist settlement. While Bulgaria had achieved formal democratic consolidation and EU membership, many citizens experienced the state as predatory, stagnant, and unresponsive.
Trifonov capitalised on this disillusionment. A household name through decades of satirical television, he positioned himself as an outsider untainted by the compromises of party politics. ITN presented itself less as a programmatic movement than as a vehicle for popular anger - what Trifonov openly described as a “political product.” Its ideological looseness was a feature, not a flaw: it allowed the party to attract urban professionals, younger voters, and habitual abstainers united less by shared policy preferences than by rejection of the political class.
In this sense, ITN fits a familiar regional pattern. Like other Central and Eastern European protest parties, it arose not from ideological polarisation but from frustration with governance failure. Its populism was procedural rather than cultural: focused on corruption, accountability, and institutional reform, rather than identity politics or explicit authoritarianism.
What the Party Has Achieved
ITN’s initial ascent was dramatic. In April 2021, it secured 17.7 per cent of the vote, becoming the second-largest party. Three months later, amid continuing protest energy, it topped the July 2021 snap election with 24 per cent. For a brief moment, Trifonov appeared poised to reshape Bulgarian politics.
Yet this breakthrough quickly curdled. ITN’s refusal to form a conventional coalition, insistence on a single-party “expert” cabinet, and reliance on opaque decision-making alienated potential allies. Its brief participation in the December 2021 coalition government under We Continue the Change brought ministerial posts and limited policy influence, but internal disputes - most notably over North Macedonia’s EU accession - prompted its withdrawal in mid-2022, collapsing the government.
The consequences were severe. ITN fell below the parliamentary threshold later that year and returned only narrowly in subsequent elections. Its partial recovery in 2024 restored representation but not momentum. Participation in the 2025 minority government alongside GERB and the socialists offered a return to relevance, yet the cabinet’s collapse amid corruption protests reinforced ITN’s association with instability rather than renewal.
Measured narrowly, ITN has succeeded in keeping anti-corruption and judicial reform on the agenda. Measured politically, it has struggled to convert protest legitimacy into durable governing capacity.
What Success Would Look Like
For ITN, success would mean escaping the protest trap. The party’s stated ambition is to become a permanent corrective force in Bulgarian politics: influential enough to impose accountability, but insulated from the compromises that discredited earlier reformers. In practice, this would require consolidating a stable parliamentary base, developing credible governing cadres, and demonstrating that outsider politics can coexist with institutional responsibility.
Strategically, ITN aspires to overtake the Bulgarian Socialist Party as the principal alternative to GERB, positioning itself as a centrist pivot in coalition negotiations. Policy success would centre on judicial overhaul, credible prosecution of high-level corruption, and electoral reform designed to weaken party cartels. Trifonov has consistently emphasised technocratic governance - rule by “experts” rather than party loyalists - as the antidote to patronage politics.
More broadly, ITN defines success symbolically. It frames its mission as restoring public faith in democracy in a system marked by collapsing turnout and pervasive cynicism. Whether populism can deliver that restoration - rather than deepen disillusionment - remains the party’s central unresolved test.
Electoral Rules and Strategic Constraints
Bulgaria’s electoral system both enables and constrains parties like ITN. Proportional representation using the d’Hondt method across 31 multi-member districts allows new entrants to break through, but the 4 per cent national threshold creates sharp discontinuities between representation and exclusion. For a mid-sized party with volatile support, this produces boom-and-bust cycles rather than gradual consolidation.
Fragmentation further complicates ITN’s prospects. As the party system splinters, protest votes are dispersed across multiple lists, raising the risk of wasted ballots. Low turnout - below 40 per cent in recent elections - advantages established machines and penalises insurgents dependent on mobilisation rather than loyalty.
Constitutional rules governing government formation give smaller parties like ITN occasional leverage as potential kingmakers, but rarely control. This structural position magnifies the reputational costs of miscalculation: refusal to compromise appears irresponsible, while participation in fragile coalitions invites accusations of betrayal.
How Critics See It
To its critics, ITN is less a reformist force than an accelerant of dysfunction. Centrist opponents portray it as erratic and unserious, blaming its coalition withdrawals for prolonging Bulgaria’s electoral paralysis. On the left, it is dismissed as populism without redistribution - socially conservative, fiscally orthodox, and reliant on recycled elites despite its anti-elite rhetoric. On the right, it is derided as amateurish and opportunistic.
More broadly, ITN is criticised for personalisation and opacity. Trifonov’s remote leadership style, reliance on social media announcements, and resistance to internal party democracy reinforce perceptions that the party reproduces the very pathologies it claims to oppose. What began as outsider authenticity increasingly looks, to detractors, like avoidance of accountability.
How It May Be Remembered
ITN’s long-term legacy will depend less on its vote share than on its systemic impact. If Bulgaria eventually escapes its cycle of instability and implements meaningful judicial reform, ITN may be remembered as one of several protest vehicles that exposed the unsustainability of elite capture. In that sense, it would resemble earlier populist surges whose greatest influence lay in what they forced others to confront.
More likely, however, ITN will be recalled as a symptom rather than a solution: a vivid illustration of how public anger can upend politics without rebuilding it. Like the National Movement Simeon II two decades earlier, it promised renewal, achieved momentary dominance, and then struggled to institutionalise change.
Whether ITN endures or fades, its rise underscores a deeper truth about Bulgarian democracy. The problem is not a shortage of protest parties - but the difficulty of turning protest into governance.