Do we like them?

Do we like Boyko Borisov?

Our score: 5 out of 10. The record is complicated and our verified sources are thin, so this sits in the middle until more can be checked.

Boyko Borisov is the man who has dominated Bulgarian politics for most of the last two decades. He founded the centre-right GERB party and led it to election wins, and Al Jazeera's report on the October 2022 vote shows GERB still finishing first years after he left the prime minister's chair.

Honest warning: our page-fetching tool was blocked while we researched him, so we only have search listings for most of the detail below. Where we couldn't read the full article, we've held back rather than guess.

The biggest cloud over his circle is the 2021 US sanctions on Bulgarian power brokers, reported by Axios. As far as the search results show, Borisov himself was not on that list, and he has publicly dismissed claims made against him by a sanctioned gambling businessman. We could not open the reporting to say more than that.

On the harm test, listings from 2018 say GERB pulled the Istanbul Convention on violence against women from ratification, amid a campaign that targeted gender and LGBTQ+ people. We couldn't open a dated article on his own words, so we're not scoring it as a fail, and we found nothing recent from him on trans people or the planet.

Nothing verified from the last few months made it into this card. Search listings suggest he was re-elected GERB chair in 2026 and has fought the government over the budget, but we couldn't confirm dates, so treat it as a lead only.

That's honestly the whole list for now: a long-serving conservative with real questions around him and not enough opened evidence to rule on them. Worth a second look once the sources are checkable.