It sounded a little cocky when Assen Wassilew said in the middle of last week: "The trend is up, we have a chance of first place." eight points behind the conservative GERB party of the former Prime Minister Boyko Borrisow, who was accompanied by allegations of corruption, in second place.

That was a success, as Vasilev and his friend Kyrill Petkow had only founded the party in September.

Andreas Mihm

Business correspondent for Austria, East-Central and Southeastern Europe and Turkey based in Vienna.

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But Wassilev's self-confident self-assurance was not deceiving: Monday morning, around half of the votes have been counted, his party is well ahead of GERB with 26 percent of the vote, which only comes to around 21 percent.

Together with two other reform parties and the socialists, this should give the new grouping in desperately poor Bulgaria an option to keep the promise made with their name for further changes through government action.

But who are the supposedly new strong men in Sofia?

And how did they manage to seize power from almost nothing in such a short time, even when only four out of ten Bulgarians went to the ballot box in the midst of the worst of the coronavirus crisis?

A career in politics was never planned 

The fact that he and his friend Kyrill Petkow, some call them the "Harvard Duo", would run for government offices was never planned, said Wassilew a few days ago in a phone call from his company headquarters in Sofia, which had been converted into a provisional election campaign and party headquarters.

Not even when President Rumen Radew appointed the entrepreneurs as temporary ministers in May of this year: Petkov for economics, Vasilev for finances.

Both succeeded and cleaned up their authorities. Petkow ventilated the state development bank, which gave its funds to a few large instead of the intended many small entrepreneurs. Vasilev, who in 2013, when he was 35 at the time, headed the Ministry of Economics, Energy and Tourism for 77 days in the midst of an energy crisis, turned the Ministry of Finance on its head. "All controls were switched off, we found many indications of corruption and the misuse of state funds." Prosecutors were brought in.

Vasilev and his people reformed the tax collection: “So far, they have concentrated on small shops, bakeries, hairdressers and so on.

We have geared the work towards the large, delinquent taxpayers.

We found an additional 2.5 billion levs within four months. ”That corresponded to around 5 percent of the planned government spending in 2021.

There was more money for health care and pensions increased.

"Many pensioners are now living up and no longer living below the poverty line," says Vasilev.

"No corruption, no inefficiencies"

The public was amazed at what was possible, the government's approval rating was 54 percent.

Petkov and Vasilev, sailing on the tailwind of public opinion, took pleasure in governing.

“Actually, we just wanted to stay there for a few months, solve problems and then get back to business,” says Vasilev.

That was yesterday.

Now the technocrats who left government because of the election campaign in mid-September appear to have the electoral mandate to continue the change as politicians.