In Bulgaria’s public sphere, a curious and at first glance unexpected conviction has begun to circulate: that the youngest generation – those born after the end of the transition, now in their early twenties – may carry within itself something long absent from the country. Not so much hope, as a refusal to accept a historical inertia that earlier generations had come to treat almost as a natural given. This emerging civic sensibility does not resemble the episodic surges of enthusiasm that quickly dissolve into general cynicism. It is increasingly regarded with the expectation that the social imagination might once again be set in motion. Unlike those who grew up under the chronic fatigue of the transition, today’s twenty-somethings do not carry the internal assumption that nothing can ever change. This seemingly minor psychological detail sets a different trajectory – and raises the question of what exactly these young people inherit, and whether that inheritance will allow them to achieve what all before them failed to accomplish.

Every society has its long biography of failures and missed opportunities. In the Bulgarian case, these cannot be explained simply by a lack of talent, knowledge, or desire for change. The problem is more basic and more uncomfortable: the state has never succeeded in achieving a durable, autonomous stabilization on its own foundations – not even in periods that later appear relatively orderly (1920–1939; socialism). For more than a century, Bulgaria has lived in a mode of perpetual beginning: a new state after Liberation, new institutions after the wars, a new political model after 1944, another after 1989. None of these moments ever reached a point at which society could say, “All right, this is our normality; from here on, we build.”

Instead, each period replaced the previous one with the sense of a provisional solution. The result has been an accumulation of generations living in the same condition: always starting from scratch, repairing damage left by others, fixing a state that is nominally theirs, yet never became so in a way that inspires trust. Young people perceive this far more instinctively than their parents. They enter political life without having lived through the great national disappointments, and for that reason their illusions are fewer and their impatience greater.

This does not make them “better” or “braver,” only different. And it is precisely here that the most important historical question emerges: what can the next generation do if the state it inherits remains structurally unfinished? This is neither an accusation nor an excuse. It is a recognition of the fact that in Bulgaria, modernity has begun several times over but has never reached a stable form. In the period after Liberation, institutions were built quickly and often mechanically, because society outpaced its own administrative infrastructure. In the interwar years, the state made serious efforts toward modernization, but continuous crises consumed resources, while the “national ideal,” understood as a life-or-death struggle for the realization of a Greater Bulgaria, left no room for “unpatriotic” ideas such as the construction of simple normality. Socialism provided order, but not autonomy: everything seemed to function, yet according to someone else’s will. After 1989, Bulgaria found itself with all the formal attributes of democracy, but with only a small portion of the substance that makes democracy sustainable.

This is the historical environment in which Generation Z appears – not as saviors, but as the first generation to have, from early childhood, a mass and everyday exposure to functioning societies. Not episodic, not mediated, but real and early. They see that elsewhere institutions are not abstractions, but tools; that social conflict does not necessarily mean chaos; that the future can take a concrete shape rather than remain an eternal promise. This experience, expanded through mobility, education, emigration, and digital communities, produces a generation that measures Bulgaria not by inherited justifications, but by visible outcomes.

That is precisely why they are unwilling to accept statements such as “that’s just how things are here,” “nothing can be done,” or “everyone is corrupt” – mantras that held society in resignation for three decades. They do not slip easily into these formulas because they do not carry the internal exhaustion that produced them. Whether this will prove sufficient for genuine change is a separate question. What matters is that, for the first time in a long while, there exists a generation that responds to Bulgarian reality as something corrigible, rather than as a force of nature.

At this point, the next and heavier question inevitably arises: why did all previous generations fail? Not morally, but structurally. Why did none of them succeed in completing the task of dismantling inherited deficits – not merely “reforming” them, but bringing them to some point of completion? Why does Bulgarian modernity still behave like a project in its infancy? And finally: do the young stand a chance of accomplishing what eluded everyone else, or are they destined to repeat the same sequence of disappointments?

If we look back over the past century and more, it becomes clear that every Bulgarian generation has entered adulthood with the same hope: that it would finally complete what its predecessors had failed to do — to turn the state into a governable home and society into a place where effort actually matters. And every generation, without exception, has arrived at the same disappointment (regardless of the partial successes that individual periods inevitably achieved): that no matter how hard it tries, it ultimately has to start again “from zero.” There is more structure than fate in this recurring pattern. It does not stem from national character or from some vaguely defined “Balkan peculiarity,” but from a specific historical sequence that Bulgaria has accumulated: modernization always begins earlier at the level of expectations than at the level of institutional capacity. Each generation therefore moves forward faster than the state can sustain, and at some point the two speeds collide. From this collision emerge the cynicism of the forty-year-olds, the fatigue of the fifty-year-olds, and the apathy of the sixty-year-olds. What young people today experience as “gridlock” was everyday life for those who came before them.

The great illusion of the generation that came of age after Liberation was the belief that the modern state would settle onto popular enthusiasm the way a house is built on a stone foundation. In reality, the new institutions arose on top of a society that lacked even the most basic habits of political autonomy. The state was desired, but not understood. This produced cycles of enthusiasm followed by equally abrupt moments of disillusionment. The interwar generation believed in feverish modernization, but under conditions in which the country was losing more than it was gaining. One part of society pressed for revenge, another for stability; between these two impulses no common ground emerged on which the project called “Bulgaria” could be completed.

The generation of socialism, in turn, inherited a state that finally functioned, but according to a logic incompatible with civic autonomy. Here the failure did not arise from a lack of order, but from the absence of participation in creating it. When institutions operate in a way that is formally accessible but substantively closed to initiatives not generated by the system itself, people learn not how to govern them, but how to circumvent them. They learn to obey rules publicly and neutralize them privately. This is neither an excuse nor a moral choice, but an adaptation to a model that renders personal responsibility meaningless. After 1989, this survival strategy turned into a mechanism of disintegration: democracy does not allow for a smooth transition from circumvention to participation, because the two practices require opposite dispositions.

Circumvention trains people in distrust, minimal exposure, and the habit of treating institutions as obstacles rather than as instruments. Participation presupposes the reverse: visibility, responsibility, and a willingness to take risks. And when the only available social competence has been life “between the lines,” democratic institutions are left without citizens capable of inhabiting them. Citizenship does not emerge where there has previously been only a subject with two lives — one visible, one hidden. Thus the generation of the 1990s entered freedom equipped with tools that did not belong to it and habits that actively undermined it. There was no realistic way for it to complete what had been begun.

The generation of the transition — those now between forty and fifty-five — carries the heaviest psychological wound. They believed that democracy was a moment rather than a process. That by “returning to Europe,” the past would dissolve on its own. That the market would organize society automatically, and corruption would prove a temporary deviation. They grew up convinced that writing the right laws and repeating the right words would be enough to make the country normal. This belief was an illusion, but an unavoidable one — because none of them had ever experienced normality from the inside. They approached reform through the language of emotion: “break the mobsters,” “remove the communists,” “open the windows to Europe.” What was missing was a sober view of structures, of economic dependencies, of weak institutions incapable of protecting anyone. And when, after years of effort, nothing essential changed, this generation internalized the failure — as proof that the country itself was beyond repair. From that point on, it abandoned visions of the future and narrowed its focus to sheer survival.

The generation that follows — the young people now labeled Gen Z — inherits not only a state with unfinished tasks, but also an emotional climate shaped by decades of disappointment. This is their greatest obstacle, and it comes less from institutions than from society itself. Unlike previous generations, the young do not carry their own failure; they carry someone else’s. They experience this as suffocation. It is enough for them to enter almost any political conversation to feel the familiar Bulgarian “it can’t be done” begin to thicken around them. This is why their reactions are so sharp and uncompromising: they refuse to accept inherited damage as their baseline reality.

All generations so far have failed not because they were untalented or spineless, but because they entered a struggle whose rules had already been fixed by history. Every attempt to change Bulgaria from within collided with the same wall: the absence of a completed institutional foundation capable of converting social energy into real political outcomes. What young people today perceive as “possibility,” earlier generations experienced as “futility.” Both perceptions were accurate for their respective moments.

What distinguishes Gen Z from all those before them is not moral purity or some mythologized courage, but a structural fact: they are the first Bulgarian generation to grow up in two parallel worlds. One is Bulgaria, with its chronic deficits; the other is not an abstract “West,” but direct, early experience of functioning societies. While parents and grandparents learned “politics” from books, newspapers, and national mythologies, the young learn it from the full repertoire of lived reality — educational programs, student mobility, short-term work abroad, digital networks, and cultural ecosystems unconstrained by borders. They do not merely imagine normality. They have seen it. And that changes everything.

They do not measure Bulgaria against the idealized West of the 1990s, which for their parents existed as an abstract image of salvation. They measure it against concrete places where they have lived, studied, or worked, even if only briefly. Their critique is therefore not ideological, but empirical. It is not accumulated from books, but formed through experience. And once someone has seen how an institution can actually function, how quickly problems can be resolved, how predictable rules can be, returning to Bulgarian reality produces not the familiar anger, but a stronger reaction: refusal.

This is the first strength of Gen Z. They are unwilling to accept Bulgarian clumsiness as a natural condition. Previous generations treated chaos as part of the natural order — something that could be temporarily mitigated, but never fundamentally removed. The young perceive chaos as a technical problem, and therefore as something that can be fixed. From this follows their otherwise puzzling intolerance for phrases such as “that’s how it’s been for thirty years.” For them, this is not inherited wisdom, but a symptom of missing effort.

The second strength is psychological. Unlike their predecessors, Gen Z does not carry the internalized guilt of the transition — that peculiar mixture of shame, despair, and resentment that shaped the inner lives of those now in their forties and fifties. They did not experience the humiliation of bankruptcies, mass poverty, unemployment, the abrupt replacement of one order with another, or the collapse of stable expectations of justice. They never acquired the reflex to “keep their heads down,” to avoid conflict, to adapt silently. Their psyche is more elastic because it was not broken. There is no romanticism in this observation — only historical differentiation: every generation is shaped not only by what it has endured, but also by what it has been spared.

The third strength is technological. For Gen Z, technology is not an accessory to life, but an environment of coordination, identity, and action. For the first time, a Bulgarian generation possesses tools of independent organization that lie largely beyond the reach of older mechanisms of power. This does not mean that the young are naturally revolutionary, but that they are no longer confined by local authorities. They can form communities without intermediaries, exchange ideas in real time, and articulate causes that do not depend on established political actors. This informational autonomy does not guarantee success, but it guarantees freedom of perception. Any durable monopoly on truth has been irreversibly dismantled.

Strengths, however, never come without cost. Gen Z also inherits weaknesses that are not personal, but structural — consequences of the state it receives. The most serious of these is economic insecurity. Few have access to capital, stable housing, or long-term predictability. Bulgaria remains a country in which even capable and ambitious people live in constant precarity. This sharply limits the possibility of sustained civic engagement: it is difficult to build a future when one’s life is structured around temporary contracts and low incomes. This explains the high readiness to leave the country — not as a lack of attachment, but as a sober assessment of conditions.

The second weakness is political. The young possess a strong sense of justice, but lack effective channels through which it can be translated into collective power. Bulgaria’s political system is closed to new actors in a far deeper sense than is visible from the outside. Parties function not as platforms for participation, but as mechanisms for allocating power, resources, and influence. A young person may protest, engage in civic initiatives, or shape public discourse, yet remain largely excluded from the structures where decisions are made. Older generations do not merely hold power; they control the mechanisms through which it reproduces itself.

The third weakness is social atomization. The young are more autonomous than ever, but autonomy does not automatically produce collectivity. On the contrary, many respond to injustice individually — through exit, withdrawal, or relocation. The capacity for collective action has not disappeared, but neither has it been systematically cultivated. The society they inherit offers few durable forms of solidarity capable of converting individual energy into collective force.

For this reason, the question of whether Gen Z “has a chance” cannot be answered by enumerating strengths or diagnosing weaknesses. The decisive issue is whether Bulgaria, as a system, will permit any generation to effect fundamental change at all. This is not a psychological problem, but a structural one. If institutions remain unfinished, politics remains closed, and the economy continues to produce insecurity, even the most capable generations will see their potential advantages erode. Bulgarian history has demonstrated this repeatedly.

If there is something genuinely new today, it is this: for the first time in decades, a generation is growing up in Bulgaria that does not define itself through defeat. They are exhausted by other people’s failures, but do not imagine themselves as their future custodians. This does not guarantee success, but it opens a space for it. Change begins precisely where earlier generations refused to begin — with the refusal to accept reality as an immovable given.

At this point, the reflection reaches its central question: how can an “unfinished past” be interrupted at all, and can Gen Z become the first generation not merely to anticipate change, but to carry it through?

If we try to explain in a single sentence why Bulgaria has such difficulty freeing itself from its “unfinished past,” the most accurate answer would be this: the country has never managed to see itself as a completed political subject. Every historical period has begun with the sense that we have not yet arrived at the real form, that what we have is provisional — a temporary solution, an intermediate stage, a step toward something still to come. Liberation marked the beginning of statehood, but not its stabilization. The interwar period promised modernization, but failed to deliver it. Socialism provided order, but not autonomy. The transition brought democracy, but not trust. And so every attempt at normality remained open, unfinished — like a draft of a project that would always be revised, but never completed.

This unfinishedness is not an abstraction. It is felt in concrete, everyday details: in the way institutions function only halfway; in the constant oscillation between hope and disappointment; in the belief that “someone else” must impose order — the great powers, Europe, political parties, the “strong hand,” a new morality. All these fantasies share the same assumption: that society itself lacks the capacity to turn the temporary into the permanent. As long as this assumption persists, no generation will possess the real freedom to change the state. Because change is not a feeling; it is a structure.

This is why the question of whether Gen Z “has a chance” is more difficult than it appears. The generation brings qualities that earlier ones could not develop under their conditions — psychological elasticity, clearer notions of normality, a lower tolerance for humiliation, a greater capacity to compare and to reject the absurd justifications of the status quo. But taken on their own, these qualities cannot break historical inertia. They can become decisive only if they encounter an institutional environment in which effort translates into results. And here Bulgaria remains a difficult country: it offers an abundance of energy and a shortage of instruments.

This does not mean that the young are destined to merge into the pessimism of their parents. History contains moments when change comes not from structures themselves, but from a shift in how the possible is perceived. Gen Z is the first generation to question not only governance, but the way the country has grown accustomed to thinking about itself. They do not accept that Bulgaria is “small,” “poor,” or simply “like that.” They reject the reflexes of self-pity that were almost second nature to their parents. And most importantly, they are prepared to demand. This is new in a society that for decades demanded very little from the state — and even less from itself.

Of course, this does not turn them into an automatic historical exception. Nor does it place them above earlier generations, each of which carried its own wounds and hopes. Everyone lives within the conditions they inherit. But Gen Z arrives at a moment when society can no longer hide behind the illusions of the transition or the old national narratives. The world is too open, comparisons too easy, patience too depleted. This creates the conditions not for revolt, but for a new kind of maturity: a refusal of the excuses that keep the state suspended in permanent provisionality.

If this generation truly has a chance to accomplish what previous ones could not, it will not come from moral purity or technological virtuosity. What will be decisive is their ability to bring to an end the peculiar historical pause in which Bulgaria has lived for more than a century. To do that, the young will have to achieve something no generation before them managed: to convert refusal into constructive energy, and resentment into institutional form — through pressure, participation, and new forms of community. Not to settle for distance, but to create an environment in which effort outweighs inheritance.

Perhaps this is where the greatest hope lies. Not because Gen Z is purer, better, or more talented, but because it is the first generation to arrive without the obligation to justify the past. They do not carry old wounds, nor do they owe nostalgia to anyone. They may break the chain not because they are revolutionaries, but because they simply refuse to accept the unfinished as natural. That is not a small shift. It is a historical rupture that may prove decisive.

And if Bulgaria ever manages to step beyond its long historical shadow, it will likely happen not through grand gestures or sudden catastrophes, but through the gradual yet firm consolidation of a new sense of reality: that the state is a space that can be completed; that society is capable of building itself; that the future is not a promise, but work. And that the young entering this work are not merely the next hope, but the first genuine opportunity to close Bulgaria’s long cycle of incompletion.

This is where the “unending past” can finally become a finished past — not because history will be forgotten, but because we will refuse to go on living inside it.