Bulgaria in the register

Rules and sources

Disclosure threshold

All campaign donations; declaration of origin required above one minimum monthly wage

Legal framework

Закон за политическите партии (Political Parties Act, in force since 2005 and amended several times) and the Изборен кодекс (Electoral Code). Donations from foreign persons are prohibited; every party keeps a public register of donors, and donations above one minimum monthly wage (EUR 620.20 in 2026) require a declaration of the origin of the funds. Annual accounts (including the list of individual donors and the state subsidy received) must be filed with the Сметна палата (National Audit Office) by 31 March and are published by 15 April; during election campaigns the data must be entered in the ЕРИК register within 5 days of the start of the campaign and updated every 7 days. There is no lobbying register.

Currency

EUR

Sources

• ЕРИК – дарители в избори, които вече не са в списъка на сайта (campaign donors of older elections no longer listed on ERIK)Сметна палата на Република България (Bulgarian National Audit Office) · 24 older elections 2011-2024 still returned by the ERIK JSON endpoint: presidential 2011 and 2016, local 2011, 2015 and 2019, National Assembly 2013, 2014, 2017, Apr/Jul/Nov 2021, 2022, 2023 and Jun 2024, European Parliament 2014 and 2019, and partial local elections 2013-2022 · 15,007 rows
• ЕРИК – Единен регистър по Изборния кодекс: дарители (campaign donors)Сметна палата на Република България (Bulgarian National Audit Office) · Elections currently listed on ERIK (presidential 2021, local 2023, EP 2024, National Assembly Oct 2024 and Apr 2026, partial/new local elections 2024-2026) · 3,393 rows
• Одитни доклади за годишните финансови отчети на партиите, получаващи държавна субсидияСметна палата на Република България (Bulgarian National Audit Office) · Financial years 2022-2024 · 90 rows

Caveats

• Only campaign donations are itemised. The NAO's copy of the parties' annual donor lists is in its GFOPP portal (gfopp.bulnao.government.bg), whose report pages answer automated requests with an F5 WAF 'Access Denied' (HTTP 403); we did not try to get around it. The Bulgarian open-data portal (data.egov.bg) also returns HTTP 403, and web.archive.org and the Common Crawl indexes hold only GFOPP's yearly landing pages and lists of filing parties (per-party reports are opened through ASP.NET postbacks that were never archived). Donations received by parties outside election campaigns are therefore missing here. They are, however, also published by the parties themselves: under the Political Parties Act (art. 34(4)) each party keeps a public register on its own website with the annual declaration listing every natural-person donor (for example BSP for 2010-2025 and DPS for 2021-2025, some years as scanned images). Those registers were located and partly downloaded but are NOT yet ingested (see RESUME.md), so BSP, DPS and the other parties' non-campaign donations are still missing.
• ERIK keeps only the latest election of each type on its home page (currently 2021 presidential, 2023 local, 2024 EP, Oct 2024/2026 National Assembly and later by-elections; source ЕРИК – Единен регистър по Изборния кодекс: дарители (campaign donors)). Older elections were taken off the public site, but the public JSON endpoint behind the donor tables still returns them; all such election ids with donors (2011-2024, 24 elections) are included under the separate source key ЕРИК – дарители в избори, които вече не са в списъка на сайта (campaign donors of older elections no longer listed on ERIK). Their titles are partly reconstructed (see the source notes); the partial local elections are labelled by year and municipality, not by exact polling date.
• One donation listed under both the EP and the National Assembly elections of 9 June 2024 (same donor, coalition, date and amount) is kept once, under the EP election. ERIK also contains about 100 groups of rows with the same donor, recipient, date and amount within one election; about half have different declarations or purposes, and the rest (53 rows) are entries repeated verbatim. All are kept as published; verbatim repeats are marked 'repeated entry #n' in source ref so they can be excluded.
• GERB, the largest party for most of the period, declared almost no campaign donations to ERIK (3 rows in 2011-2026), and several other parties none at all; absence in ERIK means nothing was declared, not necessarily that no money was received (campaigns are mostly financed from the parties' own funds).
• ERIK's donor lists name natural persons (the Electoral Code in force since 2014, art. 165, and the Political Parties Act prohibit donations from legal entities, sole traders, foreign and anonymous donors), so donors are classified as individuals resident in Bulgaria; the only exception is one 2011 donor named as a sole trader ('ЕТ ...'), tagged company. ERIK does not publish donor localities.
• Coalitions, local coalitions and initiative committees are recorded as recipient kind=campaign; recipient party is filled only when the coalition name is a single party's name or the leading party's name followed by its partners in brackets (e.g. 'ВМРО-БНД (СДС, ДБГ)'); multi-party coalitions (PP-DB, Reformist Bloc, Coalition for Bulgaria 2013, Bulgaria Without Censorship-led EP 2014 list, Progressive Bulgaria, Levitsata!, etc.) have an empty recipient party.
• Amounts: pre-2026 donations are in BGN (restored from ERIK's EUR display at the fixed rate 1.95583); 2026 donations are in EUR (Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026). In-kind donations use the declared value.
• A few ERIK donation dates are placeholders (1753-01-01) or mistyped years (e.g. 2011 for a 2021 election, 2074 or 2109); dates more than two years before or one year after the election year were blanked and the published value kept in the description.
• Public funding and party income totals (BGN) are parsed from the narrative text of NAO audit reports for 2022-2024 and cover only the parties audited in each report; values that could not be located reliably were left out (e.g. the DPS subsidy in 2022 and 2024, whose sentences are interleaved with table cells in the PDF text layer); every extracted value was checked for consistency (income >= subsidy) and a sample was checked by hand against the report text. Coalition subsidies are shown as the share recorded by each member party.
• The NAO annual lists of parties receiving the state subsidy (2023-2025) contain party names only, without amounts, and were not ingested.