Bulgaria’s presidential election has concluded, but a question largely absent from the campaign remains unanswered: what does democracy mean when one of the country’s largest minorities is expected to vote yet remains largely excluded from political power?

Iliana Yotova’s victory in the November 1 runoff brings another electoral contest to a close in a country accustomed to political instability and repeated trips to the polls. But for Bulgaria’s Roma, the deeper democratic deficit persists. Roma are estimated to account for roughly a tenth of the population, yet their presence in national political leadership remains strikingly limited. Parties have become adept at seeking Roma votes without offering Roma citizens a meaningful role in the decisions that follow.

That exclusion is especially jarring when set against Bulgaria’s enthusiasm for celebrating Roma success in art, culture, and sport.

In September, 22-year-old Radoslav Rosenov became European boxing champion in Sofia, claiming Bulgaria’s only gold medal at the championships and earning recognition as the tournament’s best male boxer. Yet what stayed with me was not the medal. It was the footage afterward: Rosenov standing beneath the Bulgarian flag, singing the national anthem with such instinctive conviction that every word seemed to belong to him.

As a Bulgarian of Roma origin, I recognized something both beautiful and deeply uncomfortable in that moment. The question has never been whether Bulgarian Roma feel Bulgarian. We have lived here for generations, spoken the language, shaped the culture, and, on occasion, carried the national flag onto international podiums.

What troubles me is how readily Bulgaria embraces us as its own when we bring home something to celebrate, while so often withholding that same recognition in everyday civic and political life.

There is a peculiar ambivalence in the treatment of Roma across the Balkans. We are close enough to embody the nation when we give it reason to cheer, yet distant enough to be treated as a people apart when the story becomes less flattering. Roma musicians have long supplied the soundtrack to national celebrations without necessarily enjoying equal acceptance in the societies they entertain.

The late Macedonian Roma singer Esma Redžepova, hailed as the “Queen of the Gypsies,” became an international star and a cultural ambassador, performing for heads of state and appearing at the Eurovision Song Contest. Yet accounts of the period describe the exclusion of Romani music from Macedonian and Yugoslav broadcasting for decades. Admiration for Roma culture has never reliably translated into respect for Roma people.

Sport lays bare the same contradiction. When a Roma athlete wins a medal, Roma identity seems to slip effortlessly into the national “we.” But the belonging can be painfully conditional: a medal becomes a Bulgarian triumph, while poverty remains a Roma problem.

Bozhidar Andreev’s journey to an Olympic bronze medal for Bulgaria at the 2024 Paris Games began in poverty in the Roma neighborhood of Topolchane. His victory became a national achievement, as it should have. Yet the conditions he overcame were easier to dismiss as an issue within the Roma community than to acknowledge as a responsibility shared by Bulgaria as a whole.

There is something revealing about the fascination with the “successful Roma.” When a Roma person becomes a champion, artist, or entrepreneur, that individual is often framed as an exception, as though achievement has somehow lifted them beyond their community. Society gets to admire the individual without confronting its assumptions about everyone else.

This double standard becomes more consequential when the arena shifts from sport to politics. Bulgaria is eager to celebrate Roma who represent the country in international competitions, but far less willing to create credible opportunities for Roma citizens to represent the country in parliament and government.

For years, Roma political participation has been distorted by vote-buying and controlled voting. Political brokers exploit economic hardship, offering cash or goods in exchange for ballots. Reported practices include collecting identity documents and demanding photographs of completed ballots as supposed proof of compliance. Such abuses undermine the freedom of citizens whose votes should belong to them alone.

Too often, however, these practices are described as problems within Roma communities rather than evidence of a political system prepared to exploit their vulnerability. The distinction matters. Blaming voters for the machinery built around them lets the people who operate and benefit from that machinery escape scrutiny.

The parliamentary election in April suggested that Roma voting preferences are neither fixed nor easily reduced to stereotypes. According to analysis by Roma for Europe, Progressive Bulgaria attracted 45.2 percent support among Roma voters, close to its 44.7 percent national share as reported in early results. The same analysis found that support for the pro-Russian far-right Vazrazhdane fell among Roma voters from 6.7 percent to 2.9 percent.

Those figures challenge a familiar assumption in European politics: that social exclusion inevitably drives voters toward the far right. They also suggest that Roma citizens can respond to changing political circumstances just as other voters do, rather than behaving as a single bloc whose loyalties are permanently for sale.

Across Central and Eastern Europe, political developments in Hungary and Romania have similarly complicated easy assumptions about Roma voters. Their preferences can shift, and their participation can influence wider national contests, including the fortunes of parties presenting themselves as pro-European alternatives.

Those who organize electoral manipulation and profit from it must be held accountable. Yet the deeper failure is that a community considered important enough to influence election results still has so little influence over the institutions that exercise power after the ballots are counted.

Bulgaria must recognize that Roma citizens are not a homogeneous electorate to be mobilized through brokers. Like everyone else, we have different political convictions, worries about corruption, aspirations for our children, and competing ideas about our country’s future. Some of us support governing parties; others oppose them. None of those differences makes our citizenship any less legitimate.

The question is whether Bulgaria’s political institutions are prepared to treat those preferences as ordinary expressions of democratic participation, rather than as an inconvenient exception to the national political story.

That question matters as Bulgaria wrestles with competing visions of its relationship with Europe and Russia. A genuinely European democracy cannot be measured solely by which parties win elections or which international alliances their leaders favor. It must also be judged by who can participate freely, who can exercise power, and whose interests are heard when policy is made.

Representation is not simply a matter of placing a Roma face in parliament. It requires genuine opportunities for Roma citizens to become political leaders, shape legislation, challenge decisions, and hold officials accountable. It also requires parties to invest in Roma candidates and communities between elections, when there are no ballots to collect and no cameras to impress.

One presidential election cannot undo generations of exclusion. But the contest has once again exposed the distance between Bulgaria’s democratic aspirations and its political reality. Political parties should move beyond courting Roma ballots toward supporting independent participation, confronting electoral coercion, and opening credible pathways into public leadership.

An ethnic Bulgarian does not need to become a European champion to be recognized as Bulgarian. Roma citizens should not have to demonstrate extraordinary talent, usefulness, or patriotic devotion before being accepted as political equals.

Rosenov did not need to prove his attachment to Bulgaria. Watching him sing the national anthem made that abundantly clear. The harder question is whether Bulgaria is willing to show the same attachment to citizens like him when there is no gold medal to celebrate.