Just 10 days after the 19 April parliamentary elections, the former regional chairman of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) in Shumen, Ivan Ganchev, resigned from the party and gave up his membership card. He has now taken a new political role as regional coordinator of Rumen Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria (PB) political formation.
PB activists told “Za Istinata” that regional coordinators are appointed rather than elected by local party structures. Ganchev confirmed his new political role to a reporter from “Za Istinata”.
Ganchev headed BSP-Shumen for three years, from 2023 to 2026. He was elected to parliament twice as a left-wing MP, serving in the 47th and 48th National Assemblies. He is currently chairman of the Novi Pazar Municipal Council, a position he also won on the BSP ticket.
Just 10 days after the April parliamentary elections, Ganchev resigned as regional BSP leader and surrendered his party membership. In Novi Pazar and among local left-wing circles, it had already become an open secret that he was connected to Radev’s political project.
The issue became particularly visible during the election campaign.
A €20,000 donation and a political crossroads
At the end of March, it emerged that Ganchev was connected to the largest donation to Radev’s formation at the time.
An investigation by the investigative website BIRD found that Dilyana Parusheva, Ganchev’s long-term partner, had donated €20,000 to Progressive Bulgaria.
At the time, Ivan Ganchev was BSP’s regional chairman in Shumen, a member of the party’s National Council and head of its election campaign headquarters.
According to the BIRD investigation, the €20,000 donation “came from the pocket of a politician from Delian Peevski’s party”.
“Formally, the donor is Dilyana Parusheva. The origin of the money was declared as a parental gift following the sale of shares in a company, but the company had belonged to Parusheva’s late father and was sold in 2025 to Yousmen Shakir Yousmen, an activist of DPS–New Beginning, parliamentary candidate and current municipal councillor in Varna,” BIRD reported.
The investigation also said that Yousmen was a schoolmate of Novi Pazar Mayor Georgi Georgiev and that another company owned by Yousmen had won public procurement contracts from Novi Pazar Municipality worth BGN 5 million.
According to BIRD, Parusheva’s father’s company had also secured at least BGN 1 million in public contracts from Novi Pazar Municipality.
A review of the public procurement register showed that, in addition to the contracts with Novi Pazar, the company had for years been winning substantial contracts in Kaolinovo Municipality, led by DPS deputy chairman Nida Ahmedov.
When the donation scandal broke, there was unofficial speculation that Rumen Radev’s campaign headquarters was considering returning Parusheva’s donation. The issue subsequently faded from public view.
Ganchev himself said at the time that he saw nothing improper about his partner’s donation.
Asked whether it was scandalous for the partner of one political leader to donate to another politician, he replied:
“She made that choice, she did it. If I support CSKA and she supports Levski, what am I supposed to do, leave her?”
He also said that Parusheva had never belonged to a political party and had no economic dependencies.
“She made a donation as a personal act for a cause she believes in,” Ganchev said.
“I work for BSP”
The BSP regional chairman rejected suspicions among his fellow party members that he and Novi Pazar Mayor Georgi Georgiev would work more actively for Radev’s campaign.
“I work for BSP, I run the BSP campaign, I convene the campaign headquarters, and the only person I owe an explanation to is Krum [Zarkov],” Ganchev said at the time.
Ten days after the election, however, he resigned from his party post.
Members of the BSP regional council said Ganchev explained his resignation as an act of personal responsibility for the party’s poor election result.
On 19 April, BSP received just 2,004 votes in Shumen region, or 2.9%. Progressive Bulgaria, by contrast, won 28,687 votes, or 41.9%.
BSP lost 52% of its support in Shumen compared with the previous parliamentary election. In October 2024, the left-wing coalition had received 4,183 votes in the region, or 7.7%.
Soon afterwards, both Ganchev and Novi Pazar Mayor Georgi Georgiev – elected to a second term as a BSP mayor and a member of the party’s National Council – gave up their party memberships.
Despite their official explanations for stepping down, in their home town of Novi Pazar it is widely regarded as an open secret that both are connected to Radev’s formation.
In Ganchev’s case, the link is associated with the large donation made by his partner.
In Georgiev’s case, local connections point to his godmother, Stella Zagorcheva, who was third on Progressive Bulgaria’s candidate list and subsequently became an MP for Radev’s formation.
The two men are close friends, and photographs on social media show their families frequently celebrating together on various occasions.
Now Ganchev has formally moved to Progressive Bulgaria as its regional coordinator.
“New is just like the old – only new,” residents of Novi Pazar comment ironically, arguing that despite the political reshuffling, little appears to have changed in local power structures.
