A currency board that outlasted its original anchor: Bulgaria's long peg and euro entry

For almost three decades after the 1997 crisis, Bulgaria ran its currency board at a fixed rate of 1.95583 lev per euro, inherited from the earlier Deutschmark peg, giving the country euro-area-like exchange rate stability without a seat on the European Central Bank's Governing Council. Bulgarian National Bank governor Dimitar Radev has described the eventual move to full euro adoption, completed on January 1, 2026, as the culmination of a long process of economic integration, policy alignment, and shared responsibility rather than a sharp regime change, since the currency board had already anchored expectations and shaped policy choices in a manner comparable to monetary union membership. That continuity is visible in Bulgaria's long-run charts: inflation and the exchange rate show none of the volatility of the mid-1990s crisis after 1997, instead tracking German and then euro-area monetary conditions for over 25 years. The 2026 changeover mainly resolved what Radev called a long-standing institutional asymmetry, giving Bulgaria representation in the monetary union whose policy it had effectively already been following since the lev was first pegged to the Deutschmark.