Bulgaria has just broken a glass ceiling in European popular culture: winning the Eurovision Song Contest.
And it is hoping that the victory — in a year in which the country also adopted the euro and elected a government that pledged to clean up corruption — can show that the country is a serious player on the European stage.
“Dara is yet another reminder that Bulgaria can win,” Prime Minister Rumen Radev wrote on Facebook about the 27-year-old singer who claimed the Eurovision title for the country on Saturday night. Radev, who was sworn in this month, called it a “Bulgarian victory with global resonance.”
The Eurovision win, Bulgaria’s first, capped a period of domestic upheaval and change for the country, which joined the European Union as a member state in 2007.
“This does reflect a certain cultural alignment with the European project,” said Dimitar Keranov, a visiting fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Berlin. He called it “the symbolic closure of Bulgaria’s deep European integration” after almost two decades at the margins of the bloc.
Keranov, who is from Bulgaria and is an expert in Bulgarian politics, pointed to other recent moves toward the European center.
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