To figure out the future trajectory of Europe, Bulgaria is as good a place as any to start.

On the edge of the European Union bordering Turkey and the Black Sea, the Balkan nation is, as of 2014, one of the newest members of the union. It is also the poorest EU member, and one of the most rapidly shrinking countries in the world, population-wise. Around 9 million people used to live in Bulgaria in the 1980s, but today it’s only around 6.5 million. Aside from countries at war and those sinking into the ocean, Bulgaria witnessed the world’s greatest population decline between 2000 and 2025.

When I was there a decade ago, people joked to me that there were only two ways out of the perpetual crisis in Bulgaria. “Terminal One and Terminal Two,” they said.

Of the airport, that is.

That sense of despair might be changing, however. As of this January, Bulgaria is the latest country to join the Eurozone, which will provide a measure of economic stability as political administrations come and go, which they tend to do quite rapidly in Bulgaria. Not everyone is happy about giving up their colorful currency or national control over certain economic levers. And Bulgarians are not shy about voicing their opinions. At the end of last year, they mobilized en masse in the streets to protest a proposed government budget, though the real anger was directed at the country’s widespread political and economic corruption.

In elections last week, in a bid to sweep out the old political order, Bulgarians turned out in large numbers to support a new political coalition of social democratic parties called Progressive Bulgaria. They gave it the most commanding majority of any incoming party since the 1990s. Like Europeans more generally, Bulgarians are increasingly unhappy with the conventional choices.

Also like the European Union itself, it’s not exactly clear how progressive Bulgaria’s new political leaders are going to be. The big winner in last week’s election was the founder of Progressive Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, who’d served in the non-partisan role of president for much of the last decade. Entering the rough-and-tumble of electoral politics, he’s turned out to be something of a nationalist populist in the tradition of Slovakia’s Robert Fico. He’s also been dubbed “pro-Russian” by the Western media, which is one of the only yardsticks by which journalists measure leaders in Eastern Europe. Also, it’s an irresistible story for the lazy observer that as one pro-Russian figure steps out of the limelight (Viktor Orban in Hungary), another one has taken his place.

But Bulgaria is quite different from Hungary. It has long had friendly relations with Russia, stretching back before the Communist era. A number of political forces—the putatively left-wing Bulgarian Socialist Party and the aggressively right-wing Revival party—lean pro-Russian. Moreover, Radev has taken some of the same positions toward Ukraine as Peter Magyar, the Orban-slayer of Hungary, but somehow only Radev has earned the title of pro-Russian. In fact, Radev won’t do the Kremlin’s bidding, as Orban did, nor will he push a militantly Euroskeptical line. Like Magyar, he supports aid to Ukraine, though not military assistance, and his country is too dependent on EU largesse to challenge Brussels too strenuously.

What was startling about Radev’s victory, in addition to how decisively he trounced Bulgaria’s mainstream parties—GERB, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, and the Socialist Party— was the........

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