Bulgaria has been run by short-lived governments since 2020, when anti-graft protests helped end a coalition led by the center-right GERB party. On Sunday, Bulgarians cast their ballots in the seventh general election in just over three years.

The vote was triggered by the failure of Bulgaria’s political parties to agree on forming a coalition government after an inconclusive election on June 9.

Ruslan Stefanov, program director at the Sofia-based Center for the Study of Democracy think tank, said in an interview with TVP World: “It’s clear that Russia is one of the winners of this continuing instability and also one of the perpetrators of this instability.”

Stefanov co-authored the non-fiction “The Kremlin Playbook: Understanding Russian Influence in Central and Eastern Europe,” published in 2016.

The GERB party won the parliamentary election, preliminary results showed, but it will have to seek a coalition partner to form a government.

According to preliminary results from the state election commission based on a partial vote count, GERB won 26.08% of the votes. The reformist We Continue the Change (PP) party came second with 14.76%, the commission website showed on Monday morning after counting more than 82% of the votes, while the ultra-nationalist pro-Russian Revival party came third with 13.8%.

Watch the full interview above.