When Protest Becomes a Mode of Politics

Many countries in South-Eastern Europe have been experiencing recurring waves of mass protests for years, often leading to the fall of governments and new elections. This cycle shapes the political system – and, despite the resulting instability and political crises, keeps the promise of democracy alive.

For nearly a year, students and citizens have been organising the biggest protest in Serbia’s recent history. At the same time, Bulgaria is in its deepest political crisis since the country’s transition to democracy, with seven parliamentary elections in four years, provoked by mass anti-corruption demonstrations and the rise of challenger parties. Similarly across Southeast, Central, and Eastern Europe, anti-elite and anti-corruption discontent and new political projects have repeatedly shaken the political order in the last years.

These eruptions are not isolated events but part of a specific regime logic, in which protest has become the primary mode of democratic expression in the face of entrenched state capture and unresponsive elites. Instead of institutional reforms and stable party competition, mass demonstrations and protest voting have become the recurring mechanisms of democratic renewal. I call this regime logic ‘protest democracy’ – a concept I am developing in ongoing research.

Preliminary analysis of around 80 protest waves in Southeast Europe in the last four decades suggests that this logic appears with a differing intensity, form, and sequence across countries. In cases like Bulgaria, Romania, and Slovenia, frequent waves of new political projects and massive anti-corruption protests reproduce cycles of crisis and mobilisation. In more restrictive contexts with illiberal and authoritarian tendencies, such as Serbia, the sequence looks different: the more the ruling elite closes opportunities for opposition voices, the more citizens turn to mass protests in recurrent waves of discontent.

Why protest democracy matters

Understanding protest democracy helps explain the interactions between protests and elections, movements and parties, and why Western definitions often fail to capture the significance of collective action in Southeast Europe. Protest democracy highlights the role of street protests as a source of legitimacy and a mechanism of political participation amid declining trust in institutions and elections. It provides a theoretical perspective and a comparative framework that goes beyond the standard concepts that were developed primarily with Western liberal democracies in mind.

Bulgaria as the paradigmatic case

Bulgaria illustrates protest democracy most clearly. Previous studies have described the country as having gone through an elite-driven transition with a weak civil society amid socio-economic collapse. My ongoing historical research points in the opposite direction: from the end of communism to the present, protest politics have been the main driver of democratic renewal. Four large-scale protest waves in 1989, 1997, 2013, and 2020 and three electoral breakthroughs by challenger parties in 2001, 2009, and 2021 disrupted the status quo.

Yet each cycle failed to deliver lasting institutional change and ended in disappointment. New parties quickly lost legitimacy, repeated the mistakes of their predecessors, or were absorbed into the very system they sought to reform. As a result, each protest episode generated the conditions for the next crisis of political representation.

In protest democracies, contentious politics are not anomalies but expected responses to crises. The collapse of communist regimes set the tone for a model of political dynamics in which protest mobilisation plays a decisive role in the public sphere and party competition, especially for the emerging opposition.

Since the late 2000s, all post-communist states have seen the rise of informal and decentralised collective actions, like student blockades, neighbourhood initiatives, and spontaneous online-led demonstrations. These grass-roots mobilisations rarely appear in conventional indicators of participation, such as NGO or party membership, yet they express strong civic resistance and solidarity.

The influence of protest democracy

Drawing not only on the Bulgarian case but also on others in Southeast, Central, and Eastern Europe, in previous research with Dragomir Stoyanov, we found four ways in which protest movements influence change in political parties and the broader political arena.

The first is by increasing electoral instability. Protests erode public support for incumbents, forcing resignations and early elections or shaping the conditions for realignment. For example, within just a few months in 2013, anti-monopoly protests in Bulgaria caused the resignation of Prime Minister Boyko Borissov’s first government and a new parliamentary election. Similarly, the Slovenian uprising in 2012–2013 led to the resignation of the mayor of Maribor.

Second, protest movements restructure the party system through new parties. Challengers exploit the political opportunities that mass protests create. Bulgaria is an extreme case, with one of the highest rates of electoral volatility in Europe. Two recent newcomers – We Continue the Change and There Is Such a People – both won elections only to see their support decline afterwards. In Slovenia after the last anti-government mass mobilisation in 2020–2022, the new challenger party Freedom Movement won the 2022 parliamentary election with 34.5 per cent of the vote.

Protests can also provoke the creation of electoral alliances, as in Serbia and Hungary, where demonstrations spurred opposition parties from the left and right to form coalitions, such as Serbia Against Violence. Social movements, too, can transform into political parties over time by institutionalising their demands. This is visible in new-left movements like We Can! in Croatia, The Left in Slovenia, and the Green-Left Front in Serbia as well as the liberal coalition Democratic Bulgaria.

Third, disruptive movements reshape cleavages. Protests can produce new dividing lines or revive old ones. In Bulgaria’s most recent protest wave, demonstrations generated a cleavage between traditional parties and newly formed ones.

Fourth, protest is a symbolic resource for incumbents. Elites increasingly employ protest repertoires themselves, organising rallies and counter-protests or creating government-sponsored NGOs to show legitimacy and compare their numbers of supporters with those of anti-government demonstrations. For example, during anti-government protests in 2013, Bulgaria’s ruling parties held a demonstration in Sofia with tens of thousands of supporters. In April 2025, after several months of student demonstrations against corruption and a lack of transparency, Serbia’s ruling Progressive Party held a pro-government rally in Belgrade.

The future of politics?

Is protest democracy only a post-communist phenomenon, a result of unresponsive elites and high citizen expectations? As political turbulence in Europe and beyond shows, this protest-crisis logic is not confined to the post-communist region. Signs of it can be found elsewhere, as in Nepal’s recent uprising, the wave of challenger parties across Europe, and the growing use of protest repertoires in electoral politics.

Cycles of mobilisation and crisis in Southeast Europe suggest that protest democracy is not a transitional anomaly but a durable mode of democratic renewal. It has structured politics for over three decades, keeping the promise of democracy alive where institutions and political elites have failed. This regime logic may now resonate beyond the region.

Dr Ivaylo Dinev is a political scientist and a postdoctoral researcher at ZOiS, where he coordinates the KonKoop research network’s multi-method data laboratory. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.