The new president won 57.6% of votes. Only 16.5% of voters.
Iliana Iotova beat Andrey Gyurov by about 344,000 votes in Sunday's runoff. But fewer than three in ten registered Bulgarians cast a vote, the lowest of the seven presidential runoffs since 1996.
Your ballot first
Out of every 100 registered Bulgarian voters, how many do you think actually voted for the winner in the runoff?
40
16.5of 100 registered voters chose Iotova (1,093,564 of 6,637,274)
57.6of 100 votes counted went to her (1,093,564 of 1,899,177)
To win half of all registered voters with a 57.6% share, turnout would have needed to be about 86.8%.
Seven runoffs, two ways to read them
Tap a year for its detail. Switch the measure and watch the ranking change: 2006 is the biggest landslide by votes counted, 1996 is the strongest mandate by registered voters, and 2026 ranks fifth of seven on votes counted but last on registered voters.
Who filled the extra 374,000 runoff votes?
The runoff drew 1,899,177 votes against 1,524,988 in the first round, an increase of 374,189. Iotova gained the most (+564,613); "None of the above" fell slightly.
The 25 other first-round candidates together won 439,174 votes (28.9% of valid votes) and had no runoff ballot line. Where those voters went is not recorded in the results.
All 28 first-round lines
Sources and method
Secondary source: Wikipedia, 2026 Bulgarian presidential election, read 2 November 2026 (99.95% counted as of 07:30 EET). The Central Election Commission site (cik.bg) returned 403 to our fetch, so official tables could not be opened; the page itself cites the Commission.
Secondary source for earlier years: Wikipedia articles on the 1996, 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021 presidential elections.
Method: "registered voters" is the register size listed for that runoff; "turnout" is votes cast divided by it. For 2026 the runoff lists only the three ballot lines (1,899,177 votes), so turnout (28.6%) and the 16.5% are computed from those and may differ slightly from the commission's figure of all ballots including invalid ones. The article puts runoff turnout at about 28%. Some articles give slightly different infobox and table values; the table values were used.
Winner share "of votes counted" is the percentage published in each article.