Bulgaria will hold its seventh general election since April 2021 as the last mandate to form a government, received by the populist There Are Such People (ITN) party, as expected failed to gather enough support.

ITN, the smallest party in parliament, managed to get the support of just 66 out of 240 MPs and the last chance of success was lost on August 3 when Gerb, the largest party, refused to join a ruling coalition.

This brings the country back to the voting spiral with a snap vote expected in mid-October. The two possible dates are October 13 and October 20, depending on the date of the election of a new caretaker government.

President Rumen Radev has limited options for picking a caretaker prime minister and most likely the current interim head of government, Dimitar Glavchev, will be re-appointed.

A recent poll by Market Links showed that the next parliament will produce a similarly highly fragmented parliament with no clear majority.

Gerb, which won the June 9 snap general election, is set to win again with around a quarter of all votes. That would put the party in the same tough position, with a difficult task to find coalition partners.

Reformist Change Continues-Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) will most likely benefit from the conflicts within the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS) and will become the second-largest formation in the next parliament. However, the support for the coalition remains low at 15.3%.

Tge DPS would rank third with around 12% but that result depends on the development of the internal conflict between the party’s chairman of honour Ahmed Dogan and its operational co-leader Delyan Peevski.

Far-right pro-Russian Vazrazhdane party would rank fourth with 11%, followed by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) with 6.9%, ITN with 5.2% and the pro-Russian Greatness party with 3.7%. That would put Greatness, the newcomer in the current parliament, below the 4% threshold for entering the next parliament.

The turnout is expected to remain below 40% unless political parties manage to stage strong campaigns.