Top Stories — Sunday, April 19, 2026
What is trending in the USA today? Here is Breaking News:
- What to Know About the Bulgarian Election — nyt News
- Mark Mobius, Pioneering Investor in Emerging Markets, Dies at 89 — nyt News
What to Know About the Bulgarian Election
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/19/2026, 9:31:06 AM
Four months after mass protests brought down Bulgaria’s government, the country is preparing to vote for new leadership on Sunday, its eighth election in five years.
Bulgaria has seen multiple governments come and go since the fall of communism in 1989, most voted out for failing to deliver. It became a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the European Union, yet has remained at the bottom of the European family in terms of economic prosperity and endemic corruption.
Public dissatisfaction reached a peak in the last five years over a growing sense that a corrupt elite was ruling with impunity and weak coalition governments were failing to enact promised reforms.
The arrest in July of the port city Varna’s mayor — a member of the We Continue the Change party — on charges of embezzlement, which he denied, started rolling demonstrations last year. Then an attempt to force through a budget that raised taxes and lifted the salaries of members of the state security apparatus set off the mass protests in December.
Several videos of altercations between opposition politicians and supporters of the government in Parliament went viral, striking a deep chord with Bulgarians yearning for the kind of prosperous life enjoyed by other Europeans.
Tens of thousands of people filled the streets of the capital, Sofia, on several occasions in organized protests, bringing out a cross section of society, including employers’ associations and trade unions, teachers, students and Bulgaria’s ethnic minorities. The number of protesters surprised even the organizers.
“There is significant disappointment among the people,” Daniel Smilov, a professor of political science and the program director of the Center for Liberal Strategies at the University of Sofia, said of previous short-lived governments. “The last government in particular was composed of political parties that the great majority of people saw as corrupt.”
A caretaker government was put in place in February, and new elections were scheduled for Sunday.
An alliance of liberal opposition parties called We Continue the Change — Democratic Bulgaria, which spearheaded the protests, hoped to use the momentum of the demonstrations to build electoral gains.
But it was soon overtaken by Bulgaria’s most recent former president, Rumen Radev, who resigned his post and in March joined the race for Parliament, rapidly gathering support behind his new coalition, Progressive Bulgaria.
A former fighter pilot and commander of Bulgaria’s air force, Mr. Radev, 62, was twice elected president and became a popular, well-known figure in the country. The post of president in Bulgaria is largely ceremonial, which allowed him to remain aloof from the political maneuvering, and infighting, of daily governing.
Under Bulgaria’s parliamentary democracy, the party with a majority of seats in Parliament forms a government, with the party leader often but not always assuming the post of prime minister.
Most independent opinion polls show Progressive Bulgaria leading with more than 30 percent support, well ahead of challengers, but not necessarily enough to secure a majority.
Mr. Radev has promised to fight corruption and dismantle the “oligarchy,” a phrase used to describe a powerful and shady elite with outsize influence over Bulgaria’s political and economic life.
At a glitzy rally on Thursday night of more than 10,000 supporters in Sofia, Mr. Radev said the party was aiming to form a government without needing to enter a coalition with the political parties that have been in power over the past decade.
“Progressive Bulgaria will not go down the path of the previous stitched-together coalitions,” he told an applauding crowd.
“We do not promise miracles, but we promise rules: a law for everybody; peace, because without it everything else loses meaning,” he said.
Mr. Radev’s success in inspiring such a rapid surge of support reflects the disenchantment of many Bulgarians who are fed up with previous leaders.
“The others are trash,” said Simona Georgieva, 22, who attended the rally. Her boyfriend, Kristian Popov, who works in marketing and communications, is running for Parliament as a candidate for Progressive Bulgaria. “We want to make change for our country,” she said.
Mr. Radev has offered a broad platform that can appeal to a wide cross section of society and draw in older generations, conservative, pro-Russian voters and the younger pro-European and business communities.
Bulgaria has deep cultural, religious and linguistic ties to Russia, said Parvan Simeonov, the founder of the Myara polling agency, and since the full-scale war in Ukraine began in 2022, politics in Bulgaria has changed from right wing-left wing and conservative versus liberal to an East-versus-West divide.
“The tradition here, the cultural tradition, the religious tradition, is rather linked to Russia,” he said, “and Rumen Radev speaks this language.”
Mr. Radev gained a reputation for being pro-Russian in his comments and positions during his nine years as president. He recently criticized the caretaker government for rushing to sign a security agreement with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. He has complained that the previous government’s decision to join the eurozone in January should have been put to a referendum, saying that the timing was not beneficial for Bulgaria.
But he has filled his party list with sports personalities and technocrats who are decidedly pro-European in their outlook and focused on economic development.
“We are very ambitious people, and very pragmatic,” said Alexander Pulev, 45, a former adviser and a candidate for Mr. Radev’s party from the industrial cities of Stara Zagora and Shumen, describing the new party’s members. “We have shared priorities on how to improve the well-being of Bulgarian citizens. That’s the common topic.”
Mr. Radev has been outspoken about his determination to break the stranglehold of organized crime in Bulgaria and, specifically, to dismantle the influence of Delyan Peevski, one of the most powerful politicians in Bulgaria. Mr. Peevski was placed under sanction in 2021 by the U.S. Treasury for engaging in “corruption, using influence peddling and bribes to protect himself from public scrutiny and exert control over key institutions and sectors in Bulgarian society.”
Political parties have made similar promises before, but Mr. Pulev said he believed the team under Mr. Radev was ready for a fight.
Some political analysts said Mr. Radev had been so purposefully vague about his policies that it was far from clear how he would act if he formed a government.
Mr. Radev will most likely want to continue importing Russian oil and gas to Bulgaria and be against the European Union supplying financial and military assistance to Ukraine, said Mr. Smilov, the professor at the University of Sofia.
“I don’t expect any radical moves from Radev, such as withdrawing Bulgaria from NATO or the European Union,” he said. “For the first time, however, there is a possibility of a parliamentary majority that is not strongly committed to the European Union and NATO. It is unlikely to be openly pro-Russian, but it could differ significantly from previous pro-European majorities.”
Boryana Dzhambazova contributed reporting.
Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent, covering the war in Ukraine.
Read the full story at nyt News.
Mark Mobius, Pioneering Investor in Emerging Markets, Dies at 89
Source: nyt News • Published: 4/19/2026, 8:52:55 AM
Mark Mobius, a money manager who made billions as one of the first investors focused on finding financial opportunities in emerging markets, died on Wednesday in Singapore. He was 89.
Kylie Wong, a publicist for Mr. Mobius, confirmed the death but did not provide the cause or say where in Singapore he died.
In 1987, Mr. Mobius joined Franklin Templeton, the huge investment management firm, where he soon started one of the first investment funds anywhere dedicated to emerging markets — countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe that had been largely cut off from foreign investment.
Some of these countries had socialist or communist governments; some had fears of economic exploitation; some lacked developed infrastructure. For whatever reason, they were broadly perceived by investors as too risky.
Mr. Mobius begged to differ. He became convinced that emerging markets were an undervalued investment.
Traveling constantly — he estimated in 1997 that he spent more than 250 days a year on the road — he visited companies around the world to base his decisions on the facts on the ground.
“While many of his peers mimic an index,” Reed Abelson wrote in The New York Times in 1995, “buying stocks of large popular companies in various markets, Mr. Mobius focuses on the next tier of companies. After looking at various markets and studying stock valuations and trading patterns, he and his analysts meet with a prospective company’s management to talk about its prospects.”
“It’s very, very systematic,” Mr. Mobius told Ms. Abelson. “We don’t listen to hot tips. We don’t take brokers’ calls.”
He certainly did take risks, though, including buying during crises such as the 1997 Asian financial downturn and Russia’s 1998 sell-off. He managed to foresee the emergence of a bull market in 2009 and moved early into African markets, starting the Templeton Africa Fund in 2012, when many investors questioned if it was the right call.
Gaining a reputation as the brilliant, swashbuckling “Indiana Jones” of his field, he helped change the perception of emerging markets. Over time, more investors began including them in their portfolios.
Franklin Templeton’s emerging markets group handled $100 million when he started. By the time he retired from the firm, in 2018, his fund held over $40 billion in investments spread across some 70 countries.
“What was unique about him was that he really rolled up his sleeves and got into where the opportunities were,” Ed Yardeni, a veteran investment strategist, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television after Mr. Mobius’ death. “Because of his leadership on that, I think we saw that investing in emerging markets has caught on.”
As recently as January, Mr. Mobius was crowing about opportunities. With the American removal of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela that month, he wrote on Substack, “we may see a new political and economic order, and the country could be reopening to investors.”
Joseph Bernhard Mark Mobius was born on Aug. 17, 1936, in Hempstead, N.Y., on Long Island. His father, Paul, was from Germany, and his mother, Maria Luisa, was from Puerto Rico. Mark grew up speaking both German and Spanish alongside his two brothers, Hans and Paul.
Attending Boston University on a scholarship, he studied theater while working as a nightclub pianist to help support himself, earning a bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1958 and a master’s degree in communications in 1959. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1964, writing his dissertation on communication satellites.
Mr. Mobius did not become an investment fund manager until he was in his 50s. Before that, he held an assortment of jobs, including teaching communications, working at a talent agency, marketing Snoopy cartoon merchandise in Asia and operating his own financial research business. He then worked in Taiwan for Vickers da Costa, a London-based international brokerage firm, and became president of Mega International Investment Trust Company, an investment company in Taiwan.
He caught the attention of John Templeton, the founder of what had become Franklin Templeton and a pioneer in global investing, and was soon hired.
Mr. Mobius wrote more than a dozen books offering advice on investing, including “The Investor’s Guide to Emerging Markets” (1994) and “Passport to Profits” (1999).
“If you want to understand a market,” he wrote in “The Little Book of Emerging Markets” (2012), “start with its people.”
After leaving Franklin Templeton, Mr. Mobius remained active in global investing, founding Mobius Capital Partners in London in 2018 with two former colleagues. He started Mobius Investments and the Mobius Emerging Opportunities Fund in 2024.
In “Passport to Profits,” Mr. Mobius described himself as a “full-time nomad,” valuing independence and freedom. He never married, and has no immediate survivors.
“I get asked almost every single day what motivates me to keep working and stay active, and my answer is simple: Nothing is impossible if you stop putting limits on yourself,” he said in a 2024 post on the social media platform X. “One must always take calculated risks in life, but let me say this: The world belongs to optimists.”
Kailyn Rhone is a Times business reporter and the 2025 David Carr fellow.
Read the full story at nyt News.
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