In 2013, Bulgaria was shaken by two waves of mass protests, which seemed to mobilise distinct social groups and put different, and often conflicting, demands on the table. In the midst of the turbulence of the protests, new political formations emerged which aimed to capitalise on the mobilisations. The mushrooming of new political projects in the wake of the mass protests seems to mark an apparent re-politicisation following the post-political turn after 1989. Yet the language and identities of these new civic and party formations point to a more complicated dynamic between civic movements, political parties and the state. Drawing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this article scrutinises the links between the newly emerged political projects and the civic mobilisations of 2013 to unravel the new social cleavages underpinning them and consider how these are played out in a context of a changed relationship between civil society and party politics 25 years after the fall of the socialist regime in Bulgaria.