Unlike the socialist movements of the early 20th century, it was devoted to questions concerning agriculture and farmers, rather than industry and factory workers.

The BZNS, one of the first and most powerful of the agrarian parties in Eastern Europe, dominated Bulgarian politics during the beginning of the 20th century.

However, at its third congress, motivated by upcoming elections for the Bulgarian National Assembly, the Union leaders, who were not peasants themselves but a group of teachers, voted to become a political party.

Over the next twenty years, the BZNS remained a part of Bulgarian politics, but it began to falter for lack of a concrete ideological base.

World War I left Bulgaria in a state of severe social and economic crisis, and after a series of worker and peasant strikes and uprisings between 1918 and 1920, the Bulgarian army and all old political parties were essentially discredited.

In 1920, by a combination of major popular support and some coercive methods, Stamboliyski was able to create a BZNS controlled government.

Although most of them were not rich, peasants still participated in an old bourgeois economic system, which was, from the Communist point of view, destined to fail.

Though the Communists ultimately gained control of the Bulgarian government, the BZNS remained in existence (as a member of the Fatherland Front), and participated in agricultural policy in Bulgaria until the fall of communism in 1989.