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On 20 November 2024, Humboldt University of Berlin (HU), through the Berlin University Alliance (BUA), became a signatory to the Africa Charter for Transformative Research Collaborations. This piece positions and introduces the key argument of the Africa Charter, posits its relevance as a benchmark for RefLex, a new Centre for Advanced Studies at HU, and proposes a set of queries to guide its operationalisation within the Institute and possibly beyond in similar “North-South” initiatives.

I offer these reflections drawing on my close involvement in the development of the intellectual underpinnings of the Africa Charter, the coordination of the initiative to advance its implementation, and the BUA signature to it.

Transformative research collaborations

Co-created by Africa’s major higher education (HE) constituencies in 2023, the Africa Charter offers a new conceptual and normative framework for thinking about and for overcoming the multi-layered power imbalances that continue to pervade and are reproduced through joint academic inquiry between actors in Africa and counterparts, particularly the “global North”.

The Africa Charter emerged in the context of expanding international, particularly “North-South”, scientific cooperation, alongside an intensified debate – largely led by the Global North – on the need to ensure equitability in such collaborations. It shifts the locus of consideration firmly to the “South” and calls for moving beyond typical ideas of “equitable research partnerships” (ERP) to reconsider what genuine equity in collaborations needs to entail and, ultimately, what it is for.

Drawing on anti-, post-, and decolonial and other critical scholarship from the continent, the Africa Charter uses the heuristic of a set of concentric circles to locate, unlike ERP frames, not only tangible, visible power asymmetries – for example, those resulting from unequal resources and infrastructure across partner institutions, as well as from how labour, decision-making, and leadership over joint outputs are organised within collaborative projects. In addition, the Africa Charter identifies more fundamental power imbalances that have to do with the kinds of knowledge that are produced. These emerge through the dominant use of Eurocentric ways of knowing, concepts and theories, former colonial languages, and standard ideas about ‘development’ in the production of new knowledge in, for, or about the continent.

The Africa Charter calls for a new mode of “North-South” collaboration that redresses each layer of power imbalance. It argues that such a collaboration is, potentially, transformative. If adopted widely as best and standard practice across fields, it carries the potential to rebalance the unfavourable and peripheral positioning of Africa in the global academic research system overall.

Such rebalancing, ensuring that scholars, institutions, and knowledge produced from the continent take their rightful place in the global production of academic knowledge, is the Africa Charter’s ultimate goal. It frames this ambition as a matter of equity and social justice, of advancing Africa’s political and economic aspirations, and of fostering a richer and more potent and pluriversal global academic effort that is better equipped to address the crises and challenges facing humanity today.

In signing the Africa Charter, the BUA leadership signalled not only an agreement with its diagnosis. It also presupposed (perhaps problematically) a readiness of its faculty, senior management, and professional services staff to pursue a realisation of the Africa Charter’s principles and aspirations through changes to policy and practice.

RefLex as a potential site for exploring a transformative collaboration mode

RefLex is a new Centre for Advanced Studies of the Humboldt University of Berlin that encompasses ‘South-North’ dialogue and inquiry on the “South-North” encounter in contestations of dominant colonial foundations and concepts of law worldwide. As such, RefLex is ideally positioned to attempt a deliberate pursuit of a collaboration mode aligned with Africa Charter ambitions.

Doing so needs to begin with open and critical exploration of the positioning and orientation of RefLex, drawing on the individual and collective reflexivity of the Centre heads, research staff, fellows, and interlocutors.

The following set of foundational queries, which are reflective of the Africa Charter’s core argument, could serve to guide and structure a collective exploration:

On positionality and positioning:

• Who is in the room? What are their institutional and personal positionalities vis-à-vis “North” and “South”, bearing in mind the ambiguities and overlaps inherent in both terms? What power dynamics exist or arise among them?
• What orientations, values or “politics” inform the scholarship of those in the room? And how, if at all, do these relate to concerns about equity and social justice in academic knowledge production or material lives?
• What joint overall ambition for RefLex – between deepening intellectual insight and the fostering of “after worlds” – is to be forged from this?

On multilayered power imbalances and how to address them:

• What implications arise from RefLex’s current positioning as a unique intellectual effort funded and administered by a Northern institution; led, directed, and framed by two Northern scholars and centred on the elaboration of a concept proposed by them; undertaken in English; and taking place, geographically, in the North?
• Does a need arise for intentionally shaping RefLex approaches with respect to (i) the epistemologies, languages, theories, and concepts that are privileged in structuring the inquiry and (ii) conscious or unconscious assumptions about the nature of “development” and the positioning of North and South in relation to it?

On institutional design:

• What need, if any, arises for deliberate institutional recalibration in light of these implications? How might decisions concerning epistemic priorities, language, leadership and authority, the physical location of deliberation, and processes of decision-making be intentionally shaped to address the asymmetries identified above?

The very fluidity and envisioned continual reconstitution of RefLex – through successive cohorts of fellows – would allow for the iterative development of rich perspectives and conclusions in answer to these foundational questions. It also promises to generate progressively deeper insights into the very experience of seeking to apply the Africa Charter and into the relevance of its propositions for the field of law and for the “global South” beyond Africa. As such, RefLex stands to contribute substantively to the further elaboration and refinement of the Africa Charter argument itself.

Beyond RefLex, the proposed questions may also serve as a frame to guide the exploration of and distillation of learnings on a transformative collaboration mode in other similar “North-South” research initiatives.

A proposed outline for the way forward

To realise this potential, three constants in the process of RefLex will be essential. One is the need to create and protect – for each cohort – dedicated and “safe” space to support the open reflection and reflexivity described above. The other is to establish parallel mechanisms to foster conversations between and, progressively, across cohorts. The third is to devise a careful and rigorous method to distil, capture, track, and further analyse the key strands of thought and understanding as well as further queries and lines of inquiry emerging over time. With the official launch of RefLex on 11 February 2026 – and given the importance the Centre places on engaging its own practice – discussion on putting in place such parameters could begin.

In doing so, RefLex could help chart the potential for rebalancing “South-North” research relations that lies in the collaborative engagement, resource sharing, and leverage of Northern institutions – if done reflexively.

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What does it mean to examine political modernity from below, specifically from the position of the enslaved person – not as a metaphor or a footnote, but as a lens for analyzing foundational political and legal concepts? This question guides the reflections that follow.

I argue that foregrounding the position of the enslaved provides a productive point of departure for understanding how colonial and racial epistemologies, imaginaries, and institutions have shaped core Western concepts, such as democracy and the rule of law. More importantly, this approach invites us to ask what becomes thinkable when we treat the enslaved not as an absence in accounts of modernity, but as a figure whose resistance leaves traces within the colonial archive – traces that can be transformed into a generative site of theorization. In this sense, such a perspective offers a methodological tool for reflexive legal scholarship at the heart of the Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex.

Foregrounding the experiences and articulations of the enslaved departs sharply from the established conventions of political theory – the discipline in which I was trained. It challenges prevailing modes of doing political and legal theory, as well as intellectual history. Dominant Euro-American traditions of political, legal, and constitutional thought not only lack sustained theoretical engagement with colonialism, racism, and enslavement as historical forms of domination whose legacies persist today, but are also marked by what Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui calls the “non‑reflexivity of political theory” regarding colonial and racial epistemologies, and the premises and tacit assumptions that rest upon them.

What is needed, then, is not merely a moral critique, but a twofold task: First, to theorize how deeply colonial and racial epistemologies are woven into modernity’s conceptual fabric; and second, to interrogate how these epistemologies continue to shape political and legal thought.

In what follows, I pursue this argument by turning to two scenes of the political, located at distinct nodal points of the Atlantic Revolution – the entangled histories of the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions – which together stand at the origin of modern democracy and law, even as they were intimately interconnected: the Western European coffeehouse and the Caribbean plantation.

I then examine the resistance of the enslaved against colonial slave law to explore what Anthony Bogues calls “a political, social, and intellectual history of thought of the enslaved”. Recovering this largely neglected genealogy, I argue, both compels and enables us to rethink our methodological engagement with colonial law. Finally, I discuss the implications of this approach for the project of reflexive globalization in legal scholarship and for the research pursued within the RefLex Centre.

The Coffeehouse and the Plantation as Entangled Scenes of Modernity

The colonial trope of the slave was crucial for early modern political theory. The antinomy of freedom and slavery provided a blueprint for rethinking the human, the universal, and the political amid the shift from theological justifications to natural law. In canonical Enlightenment theories by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, “the slave” appears largely as a metaphor to sharpen the concept of freedom, while the real enslaved subject disappears. Today it is common to acknowledge Hobbes’s and Locke’s involvement in colonial enterprises and the enslavement of people of African descent. Yet what follows from this acknowledgement on a conceptual level remains unclear. While some critical scholars analyze how colonial violence and racial capitalism have shaped these philosophers’ conceptions of freedom and property (Katja Diefenbach, Iris Därmann), I propose refusing and reversing the colonial trope of the slave. This trope ontologizes the colonial fiction of the slave as a “thing” (John F. Campbell) and renders it conceptually impossible to grasp that the enslaved person was always a person – a conspirator, a rebel, – as Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia emphasized in her early study of colonial slave laws. What would it mean, by contrast, to foreground the agency, political imaginations, and desires of the enslaved?

First, we must expand our account of modernity against Eurocentric limits. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere tells a straightforward story of democracy: the bourgeois public sphere emerges in European coffeehouses, cultivates reason, and culminates in the French Revolution, which both establishes and, through colonization, globalizes constitutional democracy and universal human rights. This triumphant narrative, however, rests on the erasure of the enslaved, which becomes visible when we draw a thicker, more material picture of the coffeehouse. Coffee, the fuel of this public sphere, carries a denser history of modernity, as historians have shown (Brian William Cowan). Coffeehouses depended on a global commodity chain linking Africa, the Near East, the Caribbean, and European cities like Vienna, Amsterdam, and London. These cities were tied to the Caribbean through finance capital – an entire system of credits, loans, and insurance developed in the Atlantic sphere on the basis of the enslavement of African people (Ian Baucom) – and through men who drank coffee there, incorporated colonial commodities into daily live, and were sometimes served by enslaved persons present in Europe itself: gentlemen embodying a new hegemonic masculinity who were often “absentees,” plantation owners whose wealth derived from enslaved labor.

Thus, the coffeehouse was not only a site of rational deliberation but a colonial and racial space of sensorial experience and commodity exchange, dependent on the commodification of human beings. As “human cargo” in the transatlantic enslavement trade (Sidney Mintz), with the legal status of “thing” on Caribbean plantations, the enslaved provided the material conditions for the emergence of democracy and the democratic revolution in North America and Europe. More than historiographical correction, tracing democracy’s rise as both normative concept and political regime alongside this material genealogy raises conceptual questions obscured when colonial entanglements are framed as contradictions between universal ideas and non‑ideal conditions, or as mere problems of exclusion.

If we understand Western democracies as “empires of democracy” (Tyler Stovall), we must challenge the “Westphalian commonsense” of political theory (Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui) and recognize empire’s ontological primacy over the nation‑state (Mustapha Kamal Pasha). We must also interrogate democracy’s constitutive racial underpinnings, as Barnor Hesse’s concept of “racialized modernity” suggests. These interventions – from Black political thought to postcolonial, decolonial, and critical legal studies – revise modernity’s conceptual vocabulary, offering reflexive legal scholarship a critique of coloniality and raciality to pursue and develop further.

Reading the Code Noir as an Archive of Resistance

If analysis of colonial entanglements reveals that the European public sphere and the Atlantic Revolution materially depended on enslaved labor, it compels us, in a second step, to decenter the bourgeois and the citizen as the standard political subject and instead recognize the enslaved’s agency as equally constitutive in the making of modernity. Foregrounding enslavement in the Atlantic world as lived experience means taking the plantation seriously as a central institution of modernity – the site of the “otherwise modern” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot). From the enslaved’s perspective, the plantation, rather than the coffeehouse, emerges as the “political architecture of modernity” (Denise Ferreira da Silva), where modern capitalism operates through enslavement, including the “fabrication of racial subjects” (Achille Mbembe). Central to this regime is law’s capacity to “make and unmake persons” (Colin Dayan).

Yet the black experience in Western modernity involves not only “thingification” (Aimé Césaire) but also resistance. This archive of resistance becomes visible when reading the colonial archive against the grain – specifically through the Code Noir, the first written law of the French colony of Saint‑Domingue. Louis Sala‑Molins describes the Code Noir as “the most monstrous juridical text produced by modernity.” It defines enslaved people as property (meubles/“furniture,” Art. 44), denying their personhood and establishing their “legal inexistence” (Louis Sala‑Molins).

Paragraph by paragraph, it codifies attempts to reconcile public security in the colony with the enslaver’s private sovereignty (Malick W. Ghachem), including racial terror and torture for total value extraction. Reflexive legal scholarship must ask how we treat this document of colonial violence. Usually interpreted as a tool of dehumanization and control of the enslaved population, analyzed article by article, such exegesis risks rehearsing the enslaver’s authority and affirming the “legal fiction” that a person could become a thing (Dayan).

The Code Noir can instead be read from below, as Sala‑Molins suggests – not primarily as a legalization of violence, but as a response to the enslaved’s resistance and refusal to be reduced to “things.” It prohibited what it feared and what persisted: gatherings, free movement, acts of sabotage, conspiracy, and revolt. Seen from below, the Code Noir appears as an archive of the enslaved’s political agency, preceding the enslaver’s legal authority and harboring “hidden transcripts” (James C. Scott) of the enslaved’s resistance against colonial, racial, and capitalist domination.

We can read the Code Noir alongside other archives of resistance documenting freedom practices: colonial reports of fugitivity, forged passes and emancipation papers, and transgressions of racialized dress codes. This archive – unlike legalistic readings reliant on the colonial trope of the slave – is inhabited by individuals with names and bodies who moved beyond the plantocratic order, like Guiget: “Guiget, a 30‑year‑old black woman who is blind in one eye, set off for the plains with a donkey and an eight‑day pass. There has been no sign of the marrone for two months” (Jean Fouchard).

Reading the colonial archive against the grain reveals a maroon genealogy of the Atlantic Revolution that enlarges our political imaginary. Marronage marks more than individual acts of escape. Enslaved and fugitive people collectively built alternative forms of sociality and normativity – the “counter‑plantation” (Jean Casimir) as a space of experimenting with other ways of world-making. In this alternative genealogy, the Haitian Revolution as the most visible accumulation of the enslaved’s resistance (Cary Hector) is not only a constitutional drama, entangled with the French Revolution. It also follows a different path of modernity written by the enslaved, with the Quilombo of Palmares as the first state in the Americas (1605–1695), built by fugitives together with indigenous communities and poor whites (Cedric J. Robinson). The counter‑plantation thus appears as a reconstruction of modernity by the maroons, with codes and concepts that differ from Western conceptions and practices of law and constitutionalism. Practicing legal scholarship reflexively means making these dimensions, often concealed behind colonial and racial epistemologies, objects of inquiry and critique emerging from the underside of modernity.

Reflexivity as Scholarly Practice

What do these counter-readings and counter-archives imply for reflexive globalisation as a research paradigm? Reflexive globalization has three dimensions: epistemic (which theories and archives we draw on), analytic (how we conceptualize global entanglements and colonial legacies), methodological as well as political (how and under which conditions we produce knowledge).

First, reflexive globalization requires bringing into conversation epistemologies from the Global South and critical theoretical genealogies that are marginalized in the Germanophone academic landscape and increasingly pressured by democratic backsliding, the erosion of academic freedom, and right‑wing attacks on critical knowledge production. Reflexivity means recognizing these as sites of theorizing, rather than treating them as mere empirical sources.

Second, reflexive globalization calls for an analytic of global entanglements and colonial legacies. This involves reworking the Global North/South divide by acknowledging a Global South in the North, embodied by racialized and minoritized groups – Roma, refugees, migrants, and those “migranticized” (Fatima El‑Tayeb) within a Europe still marked by racial logics despite its public silence on race (Alana Lentin). It also means extending the scope of scholarship across oceans and continents, against “North Atlantic Universals” (Michel-Rolph Trouillot), by engaging concepts such as the Indian Ocean (Isabel Hofmeyr), the Black Pacific (Robbie Shilliam), the “intimacies of four continents” (Lisa Lowe), and inter‑imperial constellations (Anca Parvulescu/Manuela Boatcă), that reach into Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Japan.

Third, reflexive globalization has methodological implications. It requires asking what material we select and how we engage with it. The discussion of the Code Noir can be extended into a broader question of how legal documents of domination can be read in ways that foreground resistance and lived experience rather than merely rehearsing the authority of colonial law. For RefLex, questions of methodology also include reflecting on inter‑ and transdisciplinary research designs when bringing together scholars and practitioners whose knowledge emerges from the field and from experiential engagements with political and legal formations.

Finally, reflexive globalization cannot ignore the political and material conditions of scholarship itself. It requires confronting the North-South divide in academia, Northern dominance in the global production and circulation of knowledge, and the neoliberal university’s focus on quantifiable outputs and third‑party funding. Any serious project of reflexive globalization must address who sets research agendas, whose work is recognized as theory, and how structural inequalities shape what can be researched, by whom, and with what authority.

If practiced in this way, the research communities forged under the roof of the RefLex Centre can help cultivate alternative political and legal imaginaries of democracy and justice – imaginaries that are needed today more than ever.

The post The Code Noir as an Archive of Resistance appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

Bulgaria’s chief prosecutor has no mandate. Borislav Saraffov has remained in office since June 2023, although Bulgarian law provides no basis for an interim chief prosecutor and his authority has formally expired. In October 2025, the Supreme Court of Cassation (SCC) said so explicitly. The office, however, remains occupied.

This is not an oversight but a structural choice. By normalising an “interim” appointment without temporal or constitutional limits, Bulgaria has insulated its most powerful legal office from the very rules meant to constrain it. An expired Supreme Judicial Council sustains this arrangement, while the judiciary itself is divided over who may lawfully exercise prosecutorial power.

This arrangement does not merely paralyse Bulgaria’s prosecution service. It offers a lesson in how power can entrench itself without ever appearing to break the law. By relying on formal continuity, procedural improvisation, and cultivated legal uncertainty, the Bulgarian case shows how institutional capture can advance quietly – without constitutional rupture, public confrontation, or open defiance.

The “Bulgarian model”: a subtle blueprint for capture

By successfully projecting an image of steady European integration, Bulgaria has kept its domestic constitutional crisis largely out of view. Unlike the open defiance seen in Warsaw or Budapest, where blunt constitutional rewrites and public confrontations triggered the Commission’s conditionality mechanism, Sofia has avoided the spotlight.

The absence of open confrontation should not be mistaken for institutional stability. In Bulgaria, constitutional erosion proceeds more quietly and resists easy categorisation – yet remains no less dangerous. It works by mobilising the language of legality to empty legal rules of their substance. Expired mandates and an unauthorised chief prosecutor have stripped this approach of its credibility.

What sets the Bulgarian model apart is its informality. Rather than dismantling judicial independence through structural overhaul, as in Hungary or Poland, it relies on institutional inertia and procedural improvisation. This dynamic plays out most clearly within the prosecution service, which operates through a closed, hierarchical structure inherited from the Soviet era. In 2025, the conflict surfaced openly when the Supreme Court of Cassation and Borislav Saraffov clashed over the legality of his mandate, turning a technical dispute into a constitutional fault line.

Legislative deadlocks and defensive tactics

Borislav Saraffov took office in June 2023 following the early termination of Ivan Geshev’s mandate for denigrating the judiciary. Notably, Bulgarian constitutional law provides no basis for an interim chief prosecutor. Even so, the Prosecutorial Chamber of the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) bypassed a formal election procedure and appointed Saraffov under rules designed for minor administrative posts. This manoeuvre blurred a crucial distinction. The chief prosecutor does not exercise routine managerial authority but holds extensive and exceptional powers within the justice system.

Political instability since 2021 has entrenched this improvised governance. Several key institutions continue to operate with expired mandates, including the SJC, whose term ended in 2022, and its Inspectorate, whose mandate lapsed in 2020. In 2025, Parliament amended the Judiciary Act and curtailed the SJC’s powers to elect a new chief prosecutor. Lawmakers acted against the backdrop of a widely shared expectation that any renewed procedure would simply reproduce Saraffov’s appointment. These amendments halted the chief prosecutor’s election procedure and introduced a six-month time limit for interim positions across the judiciary.¹⁾

The interim loophole and clashes with the Supreme Court

When the six-month period expired on 21 July 2025, Saraffov argued that the new legal limit did not apply to him, as the SJC had appointed him before the amendment entered into force. The Prosecutorial Chamber of the SJC endorsed this interpretation. In October 2025, the Supreme Court of Cassation rejected it outright and stated that Saraffov was exercising the office in violation of the law. The Prosecution Office responded by accusing the Court of undermining judicial stability.

As 2026 unfolds, the situation remains unresolved. Saraffov continues to act as chief prosecutor, while the Constitutional Court faces a referral from the Varna Court of Appeal on the constitutionality of the amendment in light of the rule of law. At the same time, the Bulgarian Judges Association has called on the SCC to open an interpretative case to address diverging judicial practices on the legality of Saraffov’s mandate.

By normalising interim authority at the head of the prosecution service, and by sustaining it through the SJC Prosecutorial Chamber, the system opens a loophole that allows an office-holder to sidestep the strict constitutional requirements for a regular appointment (which involves a 7-year term, Presidential decree, and a high-threshold vote). What the Constitution frames as an exceptional and time-bound solution risks turning into a permanent mode of governance.

The safer path of insecurity

Legal certainty lies at the heart of this conflict. When the highest court declares that the chief prosecutor’s mandate has expired, yet the office continues to operate within a rigid, hierarchical prosecution service, uncertainty spreads well beyond a single post. It casts doubt on the validity of prosecutorial action, which weakens confidence in the justice system as a whole.

The public confrontation between an interim chief prosecutor and the SCC amplifies this effect. It undermines the authority of any judicial ruling more broadly and places judges in a precarious position. Reports of appellate judges siding with the prosecution reflect a climate shaped less by legal conviction than by concern over possible retaliation from an unusually powerful prosecutorial hierarchy.

What appears as a technical dispute over the applicability and retroactive reach of a legal amendment carries far wider consequences. The language of legality itself becomes a shield, offering cover for the continued exercise of power without mandate. Over time, this dynamic erodes Bulgaria’s credibility within the EU, despite its recent entry into the Eurozone. When the highest judicial actors cannot agree on who lawfully holds the office of chief prosecutor, the constitutional promise of governance under the rule of law loses its practical meaning.

At stake is not only an institutional disagreement, but a basic question of constitutional order: whether the law binds the powerful, or whether the powerful decide when the law applies.

Paradoxically, the conflict has also allowed Bulgaria to signal formal commitment to judicial independence at EU level. This strategy has so far paid off. Bulgaria closed the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM) in 2023 and now falls under the ordinary annual rule-of-law review. Recent Commission reports adopt a notably restrained tone and overlook the fact that the underlying problems have not disappeared but shifted into a less visible and more entrenched form. Reluctant to reopen scrutiny so soon after closing the CVM, the Commission has avoided activating the Conditionality Mechanism under Regulation 2020/2092.

A wake-up call for Brussels

By formally closing the CVM, the EU signalled that it deemed Bulgaria’s judicial reforms sufficient. This decision now functions as a diplomatic shield against more intrusive funding-freeze tools. In late 2025, the Commission postponed only a minor payment under the Recovery and Resilience Plan, despite persistent concerns over corruption and stalled judicial reform.

However, Bulgaria entered the Eurozone on 1 January 2026 and therefore narrowed the EU’s room for manoeuvre. Declaring a country a systemic rule-of-law threat under the Conditionality Mechanism while simultaneously admitting it to the Eurozone would expose a deep institutional contradiction. The result is a familiar impasse. Having endorsed Bulgaria’s formal compliance, the Commission has little appetite to revisit its own assessment. Recent rule-of-law reports therefore strike a cautious tone and overlook how constitutional dysfunction has not disappeared, but adapted to operate within the boundaries of legality.

Performative legality and its limits

Bulgaria’s ability to perform legally has thus become a blueprint for a subtler form of democratic backsliding. The normalisation of an unauthorised chief prosecutor stands at its centre, but it does not remain an isolated anomaly. In late 2025, Borislav Saraffov met with the Hungarian counterpart Gábor Nagy to discuss rule-of-law cooperation, even as Bulgarian courts openly questioned the legality of his own mandate. The symbolism went largely unchallenged at EU level.

A similar pattern emerged in January 2026, when Prime Minister Rossen Zheliazkov, whose government had resigned amid mass protests, signed Trump’s Board of Peace Charter alongside Victor Orbán. Zheliazkov did so without authorisation from the Council of Ministers, without a parliamentary mandate, and without renewed public confidence.

The subtle approach of Bulgaria to preserve legality while projecting an EU-friendly image is beginning to fray in these examples, where state actors openly choose positions that contradict the Union’s core values. This is the endpoint of the perpetual interim. By tolerating power exercised without mandate, the state has shifted from a system governed by predictable legal rules to one shaped by institutional will. Bulgaria has used EU-friendly legality to conceal the hollowing out of its constitutional order. As long as the Union accepts this performance at face value, it risks endorsing a model of backsliding that avoids confrontation precisely by remaining formally compliant. Quiet monitoring will not suffice once the exception begins to look permanent.

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