The Age of the Strong Man has arrived. Israel has a former club bouncer, Avigdor Lieberman, as Foreign Minister; Russia still has a KGB-trained judo player as premier and now Bulgaria has the former coach of the national karate team as its putative leader.

The straight-talking bull-necked Mayor of Sofia, Boyko Borisov, has emerged as the clear winner of the Bulgarian general election with more than 39 per cent of the vote. The ruling Socialists — closely identified with the corruption of the political class — have been beaten into second place with less than 18 per cent.

Why should voters turn, in the middle of Bulgaria’s worst economic crisis since the collapse of communism, to a man whose primary professional experience was as a bodyguard? Why not vote for someone with financial expertise and a smooth statesman-like manner?

There is nothing smooth about Mr Borisov. Now 50, he was a fireman during the communist era and after 1991 used his contacts in the interior ministry and the karate club scene to build up a private security company. His business specialised in debt collection, armoured cars and guarding the rich. One of his clients was the disgraced communist chief Todor Zhivkov.

Mr Borisov entered politics after serving Simeon Saxe-Coburg of Bulgaria, the former King who returned from exile in 2001. Simeon became Prime Minister and Mr Borisov rose to become Deputy Interior Minister in charge of combating organised crime.

Not exactly the biography of a pinstriped crisis manager. Yet the Bulgarian economy is in deep trouble and demands urgent attention. Its current account deficit is, at 24 per cent, worse than any of the ailing Baltic states. Its industrial production has plunged, its GDP per capita is now half that of the Czech Republic. Unemployment is rising fast.

The Bulgarians, though, seem to have worked out that crisis survival on the margins of Europe requires a multiplicity of skills. Mr Borisov seems ready to turn to the International Monetary Fund for help. That step — embraced already by troubled Latvia and Hungary, both of whom have accepted IMF loans — was resisted by the outgoing Socialists.

Once the IMF team has come in, the runing of the economy will be left to technocrats who will try to meet the tough targets. And it will be up to politicians such as Mr Borisov to persuade the country that they have to put up with more belt-tightening not only to bring the economy back into balance but also to modernise society.

Mr Borisov’s task is thus to make economic sacrifice credible at a time when the political class has lost most of its credibility. Perhaps the most absurd, and the most upsetting, element of the last election was the way that half a dozen criminal suspects — accused of offences ranging from embezzlement to people-trafficking — were allowed to stand for election; candidates are given immunity from prosecution. First results suggest that none of these candidates won seats but the effect was to drag down the reputation of parliamentary politics.

The new Prime Minister will thus concentrate fully on fighting corruption. There is plenty to do. On the Transparency International index Bulgaria is the most corrupt of all European Union states. Its bureaucracy led the EU to freeze €1.1 billion (£950 million) of development funding. During the election, independent monitors reported widespread vote-buying.

Corruption, in short, has become not a marginal issue, a trivial side-show to the vast ballooning crisis. As the brilliant Ivan Krastev (head of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia) has pointed out, corruption has become a central problem in the transition economies of eastern Europe. “They are now perceived as more corrupt than the old communist regimes,” Mr Krastev says.

The result: the political class is not regarded as being capable of dealing with the crisis. Rather it is viewed as a protector of vested criminal interests.

As long as that is the case, the societies on the fringe of the European Union — just in such as Bulgaria, or just out such as Ukraine — will occupy a kind of limbo-zone, sapping the credibility of the Union as a whole. It is a recipe for instability along the whole stretch of the EU borderlands.

So perhaps the Bulgarian voters have made the right choice; perhaps the time has really come for strongmen, for democracy with muscle. Let’s hope they don’t forget the democracy bit.

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